Many young voters love old socialists

One of the marvels of 2020’s oversized slate of Democratic candidates is its relative youth. Boasting 37-year-old Pete Buttigieg and 46-year-old Beto O’Rourke, the lineup this time around makes last cycle’s hopefuls look positively ancient.

Yet another marvel is that young voters don’t seem to care. Tracking with his support among young people, Sen. Bernie Sanders carried 41 percent
of 18-to-29-year-old Democratic primary voters, according to an Emerson poll. Former Vice President Joe Biden got 11 percent
. Meanwhile, two teenagers are running the presidential campaign of 89-year-old former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska. And young people are warming to socialism and socialist policies. No wonder it has been a hard primary for candidates such as O’Rourke, who hopped into the race banking on a boost from a punky flair that seemed to fizzle as fast as it flared.

How do we explain the affinity of young voters for old socialists — even with so many newer models on the market, and when so many strategists counsel against voting left or gray (much less both)?

The answer has to do, I think, with track records, radical critiques of American politics, generational alienation and a sense of political identity.

Older politicians have more opportunities to build track records, and those might be more important to the young than to voters of other ideologies and age brackets. Why? Strong left-leaning track records offer two major benefits.

First, they bespeak a certain authenticity. When Sanders showed it was possible to rake in young votes with leftist policies, plenty of center-oriented Democrats showed interest in things such as Medicare-for-all. Roast young lefties for naivete if you must, but they seem to realize that a fight such as universal health care is going to require somebody truly invested in the idea, who’s willing to take enormous flak over it and suffer a few defeats without giving up. In short, endurance counts.

Aside from authentic commitment, candidates with long track records suggest they have developed a personal politics with a deeper historical scope — they don’t think the problems in American life began when Donald Trump was elected. Nor do they believe that, before that moment, America was already great. If your belief is that what’s rotten in American politics stems from capitalism, then those sudden explanations of what went wrong don’t make sense. The explanations that ring true go back decades, and the people who have borne witness to them tend to be older.

It’s also important to remember that the alienation between millennials and their parents’ generation — baby boomers, largely — is laced with resentment. Among the young there exists a real faith that boomers squandered opportunities to care for the environment, embraced austerity politics at the expense of needier generations and created a deregulated financial system that has left millennials saddled with debt and grim prospects. Facing the world we’re left with, why would today’s up-and-comers look for solutions among the scads of boomer and boomeresque candidates cluttering the field?

Finally, youth is most attractive when you don’t have it. For all the attention paid to Buttigieg and O’Rourke, younger candidates’ pitches to their peers are destined to be met with a little well-earned skepticism.

If polls are any indication, young people have policy interests they hope to achieve with their 2020 votes, and the politicians making serious efforts to achieve them happen to be, likely for a variety of reasons, a little long in the tooth. As more committed, young politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enter the halls of power, there will be more opportunities for the socialist-leaning young to vote for their own — though I suspect the same characters who are unsatisfied with their voting habits now will be just as disappointed then.

 Elizabeth Bruenig is a columinst with The Washington Post.