Donald Trump has a very real chance of becoming our next president (and if his ghostwriter is to be believed, probably our last). Assuming President Trump doesn't ban critical thinking in his first hundred days, we will no doubt spend a lot of time analyzing the political climate that created the conditions for his rise to power—or, you know, we could just blame millennials instead.
According to the Daily Beast's James Kirchik , the problem isn't that millennials like Trump (we don't) but that we don't love Hillary Clinton. According to a recent poll, 54 percent of young voters have an unfavorable view of Clinton, and a sizable percentage plan on voting for either Libertarian Gary Johnson or for the Green Party's Jill Stein (13 percent and eight percent, respectively).
There are plenty of demographics that can actually be blamed for Trump's ascendancy: his virulent fan base; politicians whose allegiances lie with the Republican party instead of with the American people; and, of course, the ratings-starved media, which normalizes Trump's hate speech by turning his campaign into a series of primetime jokes. Yet apparently none of these demographics are as culpable as millennials.
Why aren't young voters flocking to Clinton? It could be because her husband inexplicably tried to court millennials while blaming them for the country's problems. Or because her campaign tried to reach out to Latino voters—the largest millennial electorate—with a listicle comparing Clinton to an "abuela" while flip-flopping on immigration reform. Maybe it's because she has made herself virtually inaccessible to everyone but her wealthiest donors. Or perhaps because the Clintons made millions off of for-profit universities while millennials' student loan debt ballooned.
Maybe we want to hear something other than "at least she's not Trump."
"We already know what the deal is with Trump," Nathan Baskerville, a 35-year-old North Carolina state representative told the New York Times regarding Clinton's struggle to win black millennial voters. "Tell us what your plan is to make our life better."
Instead of addressing any of young peoples' serious concerns about Clinton, Kirchick claims that millennials aren't voting for Clinton because we have no firsthand experience with the horrors of war.
"Millennials are the first post-war generation to have come of age after the Cold War," Kirchick writes. We didn't spend our early years preparing for an imminent nuclear war; instead, we were "blissfully unaware about the world and its dangers" until 9/11. He cites a World Values Survey that claims only 31 percent of Americans born in the 1980s think it's "essential" to "live in a country that is governed democratically" as proof of this.
"We American millennials take our freedom and prosperity for granted," Kirchick claims. But maybe the opposite is true—it's possible that the most diverse generation in American history thinks that only some Americans have the freedom and prosperity that is promised by the Constitution. Maybe instead of being historically ignorant, millennials are aware of the harmful effects Clinton's past rhetoric and her husband's policies have had on marginalized populations.
Yes, there are millennials who are voting third-party—and these voters should (very strongly!) consider the devastating effects a Trump presidency would have, not only in America, but throughout the world. But Clinton is still outperforming Trump when it comes to young voters, because they know what's at stake. Most young voters aren't criticizing Clinton to bolster Trump—they're doing so because our elected officials should be held to a high standard, and it's insulting to pretend otherwise.
