Uselessness Starting at the Top - The Democratic Party Has Become So Useless It's Making Young Liberals Look Longingly at Rand Paul - Hit & Run : Reason.com

The Democratic Party Has Become So Useless It's Making Young Liberals Look Longingly at Rand Paul - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Nov. 17, 2014

Democrats have become so frustratingly useless to young people that it's inspiring Salonwriters to say semi-nice things about libertarians. Yes, my friends, perhaps the partisan apocalypse really is nigh.

In a piece at Salon today, Tim Donovan explores how millennial-voter turnout in the recent midterm elections was low, and that didn't bode well for Democrats. He scoffs at the idea that the dismal showing had much to do with voter identification laws or other logistical barriers. Rather, Donovan suggests (as I, too, did recently) that Democratic candidates have done a crap job of focusing on issues that actually matter to young voters: 

For those of us who follow "millennial issues," this generation’s low turnout hardly came as a surprise. Last April, the Harvard Institute of Politics found something surprising while talking with young voters: considerably more young Republicans expected to vote than Democrats. Armed with this troubling data, Democratic candidates had months to adapt their messaging and court our votes. What happened? Universally, Democratic candidates didn’t bother to address the (very real, very serious) problems that are on the minds of many millennials: the racist and costly drug war, ballooning student loan debt, long-term unemployment, flat wages at shitty retail and restaurant jobs, and an imperiled climate. Democratic strategists seemed to assume that running as the Not-Republican Party would carry them to victory among young voters.

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