Activists don’t speak for voters, young people edition
Another week and more non-stop coverage of campus protests. We’re now at the stage where pundits and reporters are out with their hot takes on how the protests are hurting Biden’s reelection chances. Spoiler alert, those takes are flaming hot garbage. What’s happening now on college campuses won’t matter one bit.
As dumb as those takes are, they were completely predictable. Reporters and pundits have to churn out stuff regularly and there must not be anything else going on that interests their readers and viewers. I find those takes to be useful in at least one respect. It lets me know who not to take seriously. Anyone comparing a few overgrown babies LARPing on college campuses to the chaos of 1968 should never be paid attention to on anything ever again.[i]
What the coverage of the protests has done is shine a light on young voters and the problems Biden has with them. Trump also has problems with them, but the focus has been on Biden since young voters have been heavily Democratic for the last two decades. It’s true Biden does need to shore up his standing with young voters. It’s not true that his problem with young voters is because of the issues that get the most national media coverage.
From reading or watching national media coverage of young voters, one could be forgiven for thinking their only concerns are climate change, Gaza and student debt. Virtually every story I have read has focused on those three things. I’m a voracious reader of national newspapers and other national media outlets so believe me when I say I’m looking at a representative sample. In the last week, three writers I follow (Matthew Yglesias, Nate Silver and Josh Barro) have written pieces on the disconnect between the national media coverage of what young voters care about and what they actually care about.
All three pieces cite a recent poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics on voters ages 18-29. It asked all kinds of questions, including asking respondents how important an issue was to them when paired against another issue. They were given 16 different issues in total. Responses were then aggregated to see which issues were the most important. The results were vastly different from what gets the most national media coverage.
The top 3 most important issues were inflation, healthcare and housing. Climate change ranked 12. Israel/Palestine ranked 15. Student debt ranked 16.
Inflation, housing and healthcare are things everyone cares about, not just young voters. In other words, what young voters are most interested in are the same things as everyone else. Contrary to the impression given by national media coverage and by professional activists, climate change, Gaza and student debt are not high priorities for them.
That may come as a shock, but it shouldn’t. Many young people are in the market for housing and it has become more expensive across the country. Inflation has been an issue since 2021 and is still a lingering problem even though it has gone down substantially from its peak. Healthcare is a big deal, too. Young people usually need it less than older people, but bad things can still happen and they’re less likely to be insured compared to those who are older.
In the case of student debt, most people in the 18-24 age range aren’t enrolled in any kind of college. By definition, they have no student debt. Of those who are enrolled in college, most are not enrolled in expensive schools and so are not taking on heavy debt loads. Those who are taking on heavy debt loads are a small subset of young people. That they would be concerned about student debt isn’t surprising, but they’re not remotely representative of their age group.
It’s true young people are less supportive of Israel than older people. The same Harvard poll found strong support for a ceasefire in Gaza, but it’s not clear what that term means or what people who say they support it have in mind. Even so, it’s one thing to have an opinion on an issue. It’s a different story for someone to vote on it.
People have opinions about all kinds of issues. For example, most people tell pollsters they believe transgender women shouldn’t participate in women’s sports, but that is an issue almost nobody will vote on. The same is true for Gaza. Younger people may say in polls that they are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, but very few of them will vote on that. Occasionally, even some national media outlets acknowledge that.
While Gaza has grabbed the bulk of the recent attention when it comes to misrepresenting the concerns of young voters, it’s climate change where that misrepresentation could have the biggest impact. It’s where I think Biden and other Democrats have made some mistakes that I really hope they fix between now and November.
On student debt, I think Biden has been wrong to focus as much on it as he has. On the merits, I don’t think it’s good to be putting more money in peoples’ pockets when inflation is a concern. That’s something I wrote about a while ago. Because there is only so much time in the day, opportunity cost exists. Every second Biden spends on student debt is one second he can’t spend talking about things young voters actually care about.
That said, I don’t think doing student debt relief will have any real electoral impact. It doesn’t help Biden but it doesn’t hurt him either. Student debt relief is not a great idea now, but it’s not toxic and isn’t going to produce a backlash from voters. It’s just a waste of time and a missed opportunity.
On Gaza, Biden is not going to bow down to the campus protesters. His policy isn’t going to change because of anything happening at Columbia or wherever. For those who have doubts (or hopes), he said so clearly when asked about it on Thursday. That aside, foreign policy is rarely a major issue in elections. The only time it has been a major issue is when the US was directly involved in a war.
Environmental activists are the big problem
It’s on energy issues where Biden has both done a very good job and is also vulnerable. Regarding how he’s dealt with the activist wing of the party, it’s on energy and climate change where I think he needs the most improvement. That problem is not unique to him. Many people in Democratic Party circles are still having difficulty distinguishing loudmouth activists from actual voters.
I’m not a fan of those in the left-wing activist world, as I write about with some regularity, but not all of it is equally problematic. It’s the environmental activists who I think are doing the most damage. That has been true not just for the cause of climate change, but for the fortunes of the Democratic Party. Environmental activists are all but doing everything they can to erase gains made in 2021-22 by helping Trump win in November.
The story the environmental activist crowd likes to tell is that there are tons of young people out there who are militant about climate change. They want to stop fossil fuel production and are demanding that Biden “lead” on climate change. If only Biden would declare a climate emergency and go to war against fossil fuels, then young people would show up in droves and reelect him in a landslide.
You will be shocked to discover that’s completely false. Once again, activists don’t speak for voters. The number of “climate activists” can probably fit in a football stadium with plenty of empty seats remaining. The minority of young people who obsess over climate change are reliable Democrats and will vote in November no matter what.
As Yglesias points out in his piece, if Biden does listen to those groups and declares a climate emergency, it will be awful for his electoral prospects. He will be raising the salience of an issue where Democrats are weak and will risk raising gas prices right before the election. Rising gas prices are never good for an incumbent president running for reelection and if there was a clear connection between the action he took and the rise in gas prices, he might as well forfeit the race. Because of that, I seriously doubt he will actually declare a climate emergency, but the fact that it’s even being discussed is not good.
As I have mentioned before, the environmental activist crowd has gotten a lot of their wishes. They wanted a president who prioritized climate change and Biden has done that. Not only did he do it, he did it without generating a major backlash at the voting booth. That’s no small feat.
Having gotten much of what they wanted, they should savor the moment and do everything possible to help Biden win. That includes tolerating things he does that they don’t like. Of course, that’s not what they’re doing. They’re making new demands and, unfortunately, Biden somewhat gave in when he paused approving the construction of liquified natural gas terminals.
I don’t worry so much about the politics of it because that’s not something many voters are familiar with. It’s terrible policy and is premised on the false assumptions that environmental groups (a) speak for actual voters and (b) can be satisfied. Even after getting their wish, they are making more demands by asking Biden to declare a climate emergency.
Arguably the biggest group involved in promoting the falsehood that young voters are climate change fanatics is the Sunrise Movement. I wrote about that group almost 3 years ago and they’re still every bit as awful. They exist to protest against Democrats and demand that they do toxically unpopular things. I don’t think they’re plants by fossil fuel companies to make environmentalists look bat shit crazy, but if they were I don’t know what they’d do differently.
Despite how bad and unrepresentative they are, they have been treated very well by the Biden Administration, which has sought their input. Having supported Bernie Sanders in the primary, they were allowed to be part of the unity task force and were given a seat at the table during the White House transition. How have they responded to that favorable treatment?
They started off by protesting against the infrastructure bill in 2021, a top priority of Biden’s. Since then, their members have been arrested for protesting at the Biden campaign headquarters and for blocking a road near Kamala Harris’ house. Clearly, they have their eyes on the prize. That is, if the prize is sabotaging Democrats’ electoral prospects.
Just ignore them
That anyone in Democratic Party circles is trying to appease the Sunrise Movement at this point is insane. Maybe the hope was that, when given a chance to influence policy and learn about how the world really works, they would become pragmatic. That has not happened and they should lose their seat at the table because of it.
Any contact the White House has with them should end. The same goes for any Democratic elected officials, candidates or other party officials. They can’t be stopped from tweeting, protesting and screaming, but they can stop being paid attention to. If that happens, it will become apparent very quickly that they are all talk.
That’s one major difference between extremists on the left and extremists on the right. The latter is much more numerous and has the ability to nominate crazies and defeat non-crazy incumbents in primaries. Groups like the Sunrise Movement have no such ability. They can’t mobilize voters against incumbents in primaries or in favor of their preferred candidates in open primaries. Because they don’t represent any large voting constituency, they can’t credibly threaten to not vote and hand the election to Republicans.
If Biden and other Democrats ignore the Sunrise Movement and other environmental extremist groups, it will be good for them for several reasons. First, they will no longer waste time trying to placate groups who will never be placated. Second, they won’t be at risk of going too far to the left on an issue (energy prices) that is salient to voters. Third, it will allow Biden to boast about some of the things that have happened on his watch with respect to domestic fossil fuel production.[ii] Finally, those groups will get mad and throw a fit.
The last reason is worth elaborating on some. I don’t think Biden and other Democrats should needlessly pick a fight with the activist wing and I don’t think they should fight them on every issue there is. Energy, however, is one issue where they should fight them because it’s something actual voters care about. For some voters, there is a perception that Democrats are too far to the left on environmental issues and are hostile towards domestic fossil fuel production.
Ditching the environmental extremist groups should help mitigate that. If those groups throw a fit and are very loud about it, basically a guarantee, it will get a lot of media coverage. That coverage will, eventually, begin to filter down to normal people who will hear that environmental extremists are mad at Biden and Democrats. That could help send signals to swing voters concerned about the left that Biden and other Democrats are not with them.
Ignoring the environmental extremists won’t solve every problem there is nor will it guarantee a win in November. I do think it will help at the margins, which could be decisive. Beyond November, I think it will be helpful to knock down the activist wing. No matter what the issue is, that crowd is wildly unrepresentative of the party’s voters and the general public. For too long, they have been deferred to on all kinds of matters and have helped elevate unpopular positions on many issues while promoting all kinds of performative, feel good measures that do nothing substantive.
If Biden angers the environmental extremists and still gets reelected, it will hopefully send signals to other Democrats that it’s okay to ignore them. In the best case scenario, Biden will ignore groups like the Sunrise Movement, they will threaten to not vote in November and tell others to not vote, and he will still win. That will be proof positive that those groups are just paper tigers and have no real power. My hope will be for other Democrats to then recognize that the same is true for all other left-wing advocacy groups.
There are already signs of progress on that front. On immigration, Biden and most congressional Democrats supported an enforcement-only border bill despite the protests of the activist wing and left-wing members of Congress. It didn’t pass, but nobody is threatening to not vote because of it. It wasn’t long ago when some Democrats were talking about abolishing ICE and decriminalizing border crossings. I haven’t heard anyone say that lately. The days of touting open borders are over.
For the record, I think the activist wing’s overall culpability for the problems facing the Democratic Party is overstated. That crowd isn’t helpful, but they’re hardly the cause of every problem. As critical as I am of them, I am even more critical of those who think everything wrong in the world is their fault. The biggest problem Biden is facing now, anger over inflation, is not something they caused.
On most issues that matter, Democratic candidates and elected officials do a good job of not being associated with the activist wing. Most of the things the activist wing gets attention for, such as being woke, are things very few people even know about, let alone care about. As crazy as the way some activists talk is, nobody outside of that small bubble says things like that.
Still, that crowd is not a force for good. On issues like energy and especially immigration, catering to them has gotten Democrats into trouble. Because of the activist wing’s stupidity on policing, Democrats had to play defense when crime surged in 2020-21. Just about every Democratic candidate for every office had to bend over backwards to emphasize how much they opposed defunding the police.
It’s hard to know for sure, but there is a case to be made that Democrats lost some key races in 2020 because they were accused of wanting to defund the police. Had it not been for advocacy groups like NARAL, Indivisible, NextGen and Planned Parenthood endorsing that idea, I doubt it would have gotten any traction. I’m still angry about it. I may forgive those groups for it, but I won’t ever forget how badly they screwed up.
There is nothing inherently wrong with activism. There are plenty of examples, past and present, of it being done successfully. As I wrote about last week, though, successful movements avoid things like becoming associated with extremists and taking positions on issues having nothing to do with their mission. The activist wing has failed miserably on both of those.
If the activist wing is exposed as paper tigers and loses influence, it will force them to make a decision. They can choose to grow up, pull their heads out of their asses, and learn the concepts of pragmatism, playing the long game and working with people who don’t agree with them on everything. They won’t need to change their views, but they will need to change their outlook and approach. Alternatively, they can opt to stay on the path they’ve been on and become completely irrelevant. Either way, the choice will be theirs.
[i] For anyone worried about the Democratic convention looking like the 1968 convention, see this piece in The Atlantic for why that worry is likely unfounded.
[ii] Oil production is as high as it’s ever been. Biden has used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to encourage drillers to keep drilling. To the extent that has had an effect in promoting more drilling, it has helped keep gas prices low. Despite doing a good job on that front, Biden has not mentioned it at any events or in any ads out of fear of upsetting environmental groups. We’re still 6 months away and the campaign is barely beginning so it’s way too early to conclude anything. But I really, really hope to see Biden and other Democrats boasting about what has been done on gas prices. Environmental groups who are upset about that can go pound sand.