When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withdrew from the Democratic race for president on Wednesday, he did so with a memorable observation: “The future of this country is with our ideas.”
As Sanders himself pointed out, younger voters — in many cases, most voters younger than 40, sometimes even under 50 — supported him by decisive numbers in this year’s primaries. While baby boomer doubters like to point out that they became more conservative with age, the same is unlikely to be true for this younger cohort.
A return to normalcy, a promise that “nothing fundamental will change,” as Joe Biden told his donors, doesn’t hold the same appeal for millennials and Generation Z. And that is because of the rather obvious reason that normalcy, even before the election of Donald Trump and the covid-19 economic cataclysm, was lacking.
Millennials are swamped by student debt, partly the result of a long-term failure by government to support public higher education. Thanks to the ongoing effects of inequalities in wealth and income, they earn less than boomers and have a lower net worth than Gen Xers did at the same age. They suffered one major economic blow with the Great Recession, and now will suffer a second one — according to a survey released Thursday by Data for Progress, more than half of voters under 45 have either lost a job or seen their hours reduced because of the coronavirus pandemic.
And the perils are not simply economic. Climate change has accelerated over the past several years, and it is all but certain millennials will reach retirement age in a much-changed world —one more prone to severe weather events and ecological changes that will make some areas of the world all but unlivable.
It’s no surprise that millennials are more left-leaning than their elders. Their economic and environmental experiences, combined with possessing no adult — or in many cases, any —memories of the Cold War, lead millennials to embrace not just progressive economic positions but the socialist label.
Yet the Sanders campaign suffered one problem: Though millennials and Gen Z supported him in large numbers, they had a distressing tendency, like younger voters generally, to forget to turn up at the polls. They were, in a sense, lazy supporters — often willing to mouth off online, but not to make the effort to vote when it mattered.
This will almost certainly change. While popular culture likes to portray millennials as a pile of boomerang kids sponging off Mom and Dad, they are approaching 40 — middle age, when people are more likely to begin to vote more regularly, and are more likely to remain settled in their political beliefs. Not only are they not children, but they are also increasingly likely to have their own. They will, at some point in the next decade, come to regularly make up the largest bloc of voters.
When that happens, chances are good that we will no longer be arguing over the validity of Sanders’s ideas, but over which versions of them to implement and how to best do that.
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