Why Millennials flock to Sanders
Jess NoceraMcClatchy Washington Bureau
“I think there are a lot of people who, when they hear the word ‘socialist,’ get very, very nervous,” Bernie Sanders told reporters at a campaign stop in Iowa in October of last year.
Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist, has captured the attention and support of young voters. In the South Carolina primary, Sanders won 54 percent of the votes of 17- to 29-year-olds, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 46 percent, according to CNN exit polls. He nonetheless lost the state resoundingly to Clinton on Feb. 27.
Clinton also won seven states on Super Tuesday, but in her own former home state of Arkansas, younger voters supported Sanders 59 percent, compared with Clinton’s 41 percent, according to the CBS News exit polls.
Pollsters show him consistently winning the support of young voters over Clinton.
Mackenzie Logan, 22, a senior and psychology major at the College of Charleston, said she leans toward Hillary Clinton, but said she also likes the socialist label. She says it’s not as scary “as some people think it is.”
She said she knows older people—not her parents—who are “scared by the word.” But, she adds, socialism has some attractive aspects, as does the man who is championing it on the Democratic stage. Among them, “he’s looking at helping the middle class,” she said.
Millennials are more often identifying with Sanders’ ideas, including his promises of free college education and health care.
“When we talk about democratic socialism, it’s not the Cold War socialism. There is a difference,” said Caleb-Michael Files, 24, a former Clinton supporter and an activist for both the People for Bernie Sanders and Millennials for Bernie Sanders. “This is people-driven.”
The Millennials worry about college debt, not finding a post-graduate job and paying the bills, said Sarah Smith, 21, a senior global affairs major at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “As a Millennial, I believe that we identify with what Bernie Sanders has to offer because we’ve had so much taken away from us.”
Sixty-seven percent of Millennials polled by the Harvard Institute of Politics in December said Sanders’ brand of socialism would make “no difference” in a decision to vote for him. Twenty-four percent said that his socialism would make them “more likely” to vote for him, said John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard Institute of Politics.
“It’s less about labels, more about ideas,” Della Volpe said in an interview with McClatchy.
Twenty-five percent of Millennials polled said they would “definitely vote for” any socialist presidential candidate in a McClatchy-Marist poll conducted from Oct. 29 through Nov. 4, 2015.
Sanders is advocating Scandinavian socialism, said Maria Svart, national director of Democratic Socialists of America, located in New York.
“Social democracy is much more democratic …” Svart said. “Scandinavian social democracy is different from communism because communism is an economic system controlled by the government, with no freedom of speech.”
The so-called Scandinavian model focuses on control of the public economy through the government, said Samuel Goldman, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University.
Sanders has said on several occasions that the American Dream lies in Denmark, a Scandinavian country.
Denmark has free higher education as well as universal health care, Svart said.
That dream does have a price tag. A 2014 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found Denmark is one of the highest taxed countries in the world.
Denmark relies heavily on indirect taxes such as income tax, said Alan Auerbach, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I don’t think [Americans] are aware of how heavy [Denmark's] tax burden is. … They would not like it,” Goldman said.
No comments:
Post a Comment