Recent polls reflect unexpected (bad) news for the Biden campaign, especially with respect to hugely important voting blocks within the Democratic Party’s base. Many pundits have focused on trend lines among Hispanics (especially Latinos) and African Americans that show declining enthusiasm for the prospect of another four years of Joe Biden.
But the truly startling numbers reflect a serious fall off of twenty-somethings, that familiar cohort that delivered big for the Democrats in 2020 and again in 2022.
The surface-deep media analysis of this phenomenon tends to focus on the president’s age, the economy and the political vulnerability that follows from the possibility of American military involvement in wars over Ukraine, Taiwan, and/or Israel. So, let’s take a quick look at these popular but inadequate explanations:
Age: It’s not Biden’s age per se. Rather it is how he looks, acts, and carries himself. He stumbles and falls and walks with an impossible to miss old age gait. To boot, he regularly engages in indecipherable mumbling, especially when attempting to speak at a rapid pace. It is, therefore, highly unlikely thisversion of Joe Biden will elicit the type of excitement young voters want.
Cost of living: Young people are traditionally more liberal-minded but also more sensitive to rapid spikes in the cost of living. And there is no doubt the cost of living has sky-rocketed under the inflationary policies of the Biden-Harris administration. It has accordingly become much more expensive to get married – secure a mortgage – and have kids. Poll after poll reflects the resulting frustration and explains why so many young people are postponing the traditional marriage-house-children life goals that had seemed so accessible a mere four years ago.
Some might argue that the President’s repeated attempts to forgive student loans might mitigate some of the political damage on this front, but I say not so fast. There is another side to this issue: Those high school graduates who resent paying off the loans of college/grad school students as well as the millions of Americans who paid off their loans without a thought of asking for a government bailout.
War: A third (and less well analyzed) reason is the increasing realization that President Donald Trump’s relatively peaceful four years in office is preferable to Biden’s horrific withdrawal from Afghanistan and wildly vacillating (and dangerous) Middle East policy. Indeed, as Iranian missiles descended upon Israel last weekend (and Israel responded in kind just this week), you can bet that at least some Generation Alphas were reminded that “maximum pressure” on Tehran had the mullahs worrying far more about their own survival rather than setting the Middle East on fire (again).
Okay, you say, it all makes sense, but there has to be another reason for the turnaround. And there is, but it’s one you should not expect to read much about in the coming weeks and months.
I refer to the recently concluded Covid era – and, more important, the demonstrated failures of really big government to act prudently…and then tell the truth about what it did. You see, this is the generation that had a box seat to how government got the big stuff (mask efficacy, social distancing, extended school closures, forced vaccines on those at low/no risk, the likely genesis of the outbreak from a lab at Wuhan)…wrong…devastatingly and consequentially wrong.
And then – to make matters worse – these once impressionable young people now know various government agencies were in cahoots with social media platforms in order to chill/silence even expert opinions that did not conform to what Big Brother wanted them to hear. One additional reason for the attitude: a sense of disgust for the federal government’s wholesale lack of contrition in getting so much wrong for so long. No wonder then that so many young voters have lost trust in what Joe Biden’s government tells them.
The bottom line is that our recent Covid experience may have inadvertently produced a far more conservative generation than would otherwise be expected from this woke era – one that is not at all impressed with the costly and brutal failures of government elites over the last four years and continuing unabatedly today.
Just a thought…
Bob Ehrlich is a former Governor of Maryland, Member of Congress, and State Legislator. He is the author of five books on American politics and opinion pieces that have appeared in America’s leading newspapers and periodicals. He and his wife, Kendel, can be seen and heard on their weekly podcast, “Bottom Line with Bob & Kendel Ehrlich.”
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