Youth vote 2008: 66% for Obama / Youth vote 2016 55% for Hillary

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

Save the fact that one a charismatic young black guy, and the other was your grandmother; what other factors contributed towards the 11 point discrepancy? Was it a Brexit "rage against the establishment" thing? Hillary was just too establishment for them?
We lost a lot of effective political satire television programs in the last 8 years too. Colbert and Stewart could generally produce very adept reporting and commentary and were some of the best debaters that you could find. Stewart had debated O'Reilly many times on Fox (tapping into a usually unreachable conservative viewership) and even crossed blades Roger Ailes in private debate. Their dedication to reaching bipartisan mockery was no secret either. The successors to these legacies (Sam Bee, John Oliver) tend to be more partisan and hit the right far harder, making it harder to hit the center and feeding into the propagation of the "liberal elitism" talking point. South Park was very anti-Hillary (and just fucking unfunny) this year.

[hrmjustin]

1. The primary!

[yallerdawg]

2. Exactly.

[dogman]

3. 2008 or 2016?

Or both?

[hrmjustin]

10. 2016

[dogman]

14. Odd since that is the Primary she won.

She was attacked far more in the 2008 Primary, to the point of her losing it.

[hrmjustin]

16. On this we disagree!

[triron]

4. wonder what the exit polls showed?

Obama did not have Gary Johnson in the mix. Not sure what he got in youth vote.

[uponit7771]

11. Nor did he have too many primary candidates tearing him down at every turn

[hellofromreddit]

32. 3 AM

[JustinL]

5. perhaps the first stat is one of the main reasons for the second

Young voters like President Obama, and their earliest memory of Hillary Clinton was as his antagonist in the 2008 primary.

[mtnsnake]

6. The answer is right there in your first sentence.

IOW, likeability.

[triron]

7. Looks like difference was in youth vote going to 3rd party candidates

http://civicyouth.org/an-estimated-24-million-young-people-vote-in-2016-election/

[uponit7771]

8. 2008 anomoly ... what were the 2012 numbers? tia

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

9. 67%

Looks like the republican nominee being a AARP cover-model wasn't a good idea.

[lapucelle]

19. Yes, but the AARP cover-model standard did work for Sanders.

I think the well was poisoned by a number of factors, but I suspect many young people heard little other than what used to be an exclusively right wing narrative: Hillary is a corrupt, purely ambitious, self-interested politician who lacks core values. No mistake was ever forgotten, and any evolution in policy positions was characterized as pandering or a flip flop.

I remember Rosaria Dawson's excoriation of Secretary Clinton at Sanders rally here in NY. "Shame on you Hillary Clinton!" I also remember Dr. Song's more generalized characterization of "Democratic corporate whores".

With messages like these coming from our side, worse stuff coming from the Russians and the right, and the FBI fabricating phony potential crimes, I'm sure that it seemed "moral" to some young people to go third party.

"The lesser of two evils is still evil." How often did we hear that talking point? Older folks had heard it already in 2000, so we weren't going to fall for it again. It's a far cry from President Obama's motto, "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

Every candidate who runs for office is flawed; all humans are flawed. For some reason Hillary was expected to be perfect.

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

22. Romney was literally a stock photo of "Rich White Man in His 60s"

Bernie Sanders was a funny old crumudgin who looked and talked like Larry David.
?itok=YMGgIZSK

[lapucelle]

23. I saw a round table discussion with a group of first graders concernig the candidates.

One of the kids said Sanders looks like a muppet.

[Garrett78]

12. Even though their policy positions are basically the same, Clinton is...

...more easily associated with "evil," as in "the lesser evil is still evil." Simply because she's been around for so long and her husband's administration produced some anger-inducing legislation.

And I think the 25+ years of vicious right wing slander leached into the consciousness of some who would have otherwise voted for Clinton.

I personally know of millennials who simply don't grasp how much worse off we'll be with Trump. As I wrote in an essay about a week after the election:

Regarding the notion that there’s no real difference between the two major parties, consider the following:

1) a Clinton Administration wouldn't foment hatred or attempt to roll back progress made in the area of civil rights (Mike Pence is virulently opposed to LGBTQ rights)

2) a Clinton Admin wouldn't nominate horrifyingly right wing justices, who could spell disaster for women's rights, for the Supreme Court

3) a Clinton Admin wouldn't try to privatize Social Security, Medicare, public infrastructure and so on

4) a Clinton Admin wouldn’t attempt to do away with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act

5) a Clinton Admin would push for alternative energy investment, maintain the US's position in the Paris Climate Treaty and wouldn’t consider scientific consensus (on climate change, on vaccinations, on evolution) to be a “hoax”

6) a Clinton Admin wouldn’t scrap the Iran nuclear deal

7) a Clinton Admin would have worked to improve upon the Affordable Care Act, which has insured millions who would not otherwise be insured at all (a public option would go a long way toward addressing rising costs)

8) a Clinton Admin would have attempted to lower the cost of college tuition

9) a Clinton Admin would advocate for sensible gun control policy (and against NRA obfuscation that falsely convinces people gun control advocates want to ban all guns)

10) a Clinton Admin would raise taxes on those making obscene amounts of money, often while producing nothing of value

11) a Clinton Admin would have used the bully pulpit to push for paid family leave, affordable child care and equal pay for women

12) a Clinton Admin likely would keep with President Obama’s policy of offering clemency to nonviolent drug offenders (the Obama Admin has offered clemency to more such individuals than the previous 11 administrations combined)

And I wrote all of that prior to knowing who Trump would be nominating for various departments. Those nominations (for AG, EPA, State, Education, Energy, etc.) are truly frightening.

[spooky3]

28. very good points.

[Kotya]

13. Obama was everything Hillary wasn't.

Young, cool, urban, hip, ethnic, inspiring. In 2008, he was a rock star.

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

17. Sanders would've broke a hip, but Hillary could've really done to invoke those "identity politics"

and fire off some of her pre-2000s feminism. When she talked about abortion in the 3rd debate it was the most I'd ever liked her.

[spooky3]

26. But his margin in 2012 narrowed despite his being young, cool, etc. A YUGE factor in 2008

that differed from 2016 was that the economy was in horrible shape and getting worse.

A second factor was that Obama was in the opposition party to that of the White House. In 2016, Clinton was running as a member of the same party as a two term incumbent. According to Lichtman (the political scientist whose model predicted a Trump win this year), history shows that that factor historically predicts election outcomes (independent of other factors).

"Inspiring" is a very subjective factor and Clinton was certainly "inspiring" in many ways to women and other groups.

[triron]

15. wonder how much

the Russians had to do with this.

[JHB]

18. Well, for starters, they spent their whole lives in a bubble of anti-Clinton foam...

The "youth vote" of today was born in the 1990s. Except for the oldest among them, the Right has been foaming against the Clintons for literally their entire lives... and for that eldest cohort, all of their lives that they can actually remember.

Part of the background noise of their existence has been the Right Wing raging against Bill and Hillary as the Avatars of Everyting They Hate (tm).

Even If they don't agree, this saturating background radiation has its effect.

[triron]

20. Excellent points

[spooky3]

27. Agree.

[lapucelle]

21. I think the real damage came from those in the progressive wing

who echoed the anti-Clinton foam. The background noise morphed into an actual message from a toxic faction on the left and the odious Jill Stein.

[PoliticAverse]

36. And heard her speak against same-sex marriage and pot legalization. n/t

[pstokely]

24. South Park wasn't exactly pro-tRump either

nt

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

25. it humanized him to a degree

Mr.Garrison is a beloved character

[pstokely]

29. Mr Garrison isn't supposed to beloved

nt

[ucrdem]

30. Do you have a link?

A lot depends on who's counting what when and how. Clinton won in California by 4.3 million votes. That's from the Secretary of State. You don't win by that kind of margin by being uninspiring. She also beat Sanders handily here, too. And if you want my frank opinion what Sanders had going for him was that he made it okay to despise certain prominent Democrats, or in other words authorized non-PC conversation, and there's nothing particularly praiseworthy about that.

[PoliticAverse]

31. If only she endorsed marijuana legalization. n/t

[Arazi]

35. +1000 Eom

[pstokely]

37. do stoners even come out and vote if weed legalization isn't on the ballot?

?

[SaschaHM]

33. The sad part is that she was a campus rock star while she was SoS.

My school went nuts when she came to speak at our graduation. Primaries can hurt when they aren't settled quickly and peacefully. I really hope the incoming DNC chair takes care of that. We shouldn't have to wait months to find out whether the candidate who lost is going to come back into the fold and attempt to bring his/her supporters as well.

[pstokely]

38. didn't hurt in 2008

a short and quick primary season might have HRC even more complacent during the general election

[SaschaHM]

40. HRC waited for about 3 days to get on board after losing the last primary...

Bernie had to publicly be given concessions for a month before he came on board and stopped threatening a floor fight that he damn well knew that he would lose. Even then, we had to deal with booing from delegates that his campaign chose at the mere mention of HRC's name and demonstrations every time a camera popped up during the entire convention. 2008 was nothing like 2016.

[TheFrenchRazor]

34. you nailed it in your first sentence. there is nothing else. nt

[Buckeye_Democrat]

39. Samantha Bee's funny explanation...

... at about the 2-minute mark:

[Chitown Kev]

41. LOL, oh dear, MUCH shade!