Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, Hillary Clinton is desperately trying to lure young voters into her artisanal fair trade GMO-free gingerbread house. And they just aren’t interested.
In a desperate effort to get out the youth vote, Hillary Clinton dragged her former nemesis, 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, to New Hampshire to campaign for her. When your best bet for winning over the kids was born during WW2, you have a major problem. But whatever millennial pixie dust the senile Socialist had been wearing before had worn off. “Is anyone here ready to transform America?” he croaked.
Not with Hillary. Not even the most naive college freshman believes in Hillary as an agent of change.
“Bernie’s campaign energized so many young people,” Hillary Clinton insisted. But adding Bernie to her campaign of the living dead didn’t energize it. It slowed it down even more.
Hillary Clinton has the backing of less than half of young voters. And the news only gets worse for the Evita of Arkansas.
Only 47% of adults 18 to 34 are certain that they will vote this year. That’s down from 74% in 2008. Only 17% of voters under 30 are enthusiastic about voting this year. And, just to make things worse, Gary Johnson is pulling in 14 percent of younger voters. In Virginia, Hillary gets only 34% of the under 34 crowd. That’s not just an entertaining coincidence. It’s also an entertaining catastrophe.
That’s why the “Aleppo Moment” is suddenly getting so much media coverage. Johnson is attracting too many of the voters whom Hillary needs. And so the media is targeting the latest threat to Her Highness.
It’s also why Obama and Bernie are both warning about the perils of voting third party. But neither of them seem to be able to shift their following over to Hillary. And the celebrities aren’t doing any better.
Trying to make Hillary seem cool by surrounding her with celebrities only highlights her blandness. That’s what went wrong at the DNC. But surrounding her with Obama and Bernie, the candidates that younger voters chose over her, just reminds them of why they rejected her.
Hillary’s Achilles heel is an older electorate. An older electorate is least likely to be influenced by celebrity tweets and pop culture peer pressure. It is most likely to consist of adults with life experience who have actually worked for a living and understand that everything has to be paid for.
Voters over 55 years old have consistently said that they will vote by percentages in the low 80s. The only recent time that the youth vote hit similar numbers was in 2008 when 74 percent of 18 to 34 adults expressed enthusiasm about voting. But now it’s not just low. It’s the lowest this century.
The same is true of Democratic voter enthusiasm. Only 65% of Democrats say that they will definitely vote. Compare that to 76% of Republicans. All this adds up to an older and more conservative electorate.
Hillary Clinton’s greatest nightmare is coming true. Having clawed her way to the top of the heap, she now finds that the heap is sinking under her. The closest thing that she has to a base are black women. They helped her beat Bernie, but her victory alienated the Bernie crowd who drifted to Gary Johnson. And black voter enthusiasm for her is also low. That leaves her with lots of money, but no actual voters.
The Clinton campaign can buy consultants by the yard. It can squander the national budget of a starving African country on a television ad buy in a swing state. What it can’t do is buy enthusiasm.
The vast cultural machinery that made Obama so iconic, that even made a crotchety leftist from Vermont appear likable, needs something to work with. It can’t work with nothing at all.
And nothing is all it has to work with.
When Obama taunted her with, “You’re likable enough, Hillary” during the primary debates while she laughed her awkward fake laugh, he was focusing in a fundamental weakness. Hillary is not likable.
The case for her being made by the media entertainment complex is that she doesn’t have to be likable to be competent. Unfortunately she isn’t competent either. There’s no track record of accomplishments to point to. The truth grasped by most voters is that Hillary is where she is because of her last name.
Her accomplishments are a mishmash of corruption, greed and deceit. They’re impressive only to other criminals. Even most Democrats are well aware that Hillary is dishonest and untrustworthy.
The left has traditionally won the youth vote by exploiting their idealism. To be young is to believe that transformative change can come and to reject any compromises that fall short of a perfect ideal. And there’s no politician who could be worse at winning over an idealistic group than Hillary Clinton.
Voting for Hillary is a compromise. Not an ideal. No Democrat believes otherwise.
The media campaign for Hillary leans on depicting Trump as the greater evil and Hillary as the lesser evil. But younger voters are least likely to be moved by being asked to vote for the lesser evil. Instead they want to vote for the greater good. And no amount of makeovers will make Hillary into the greater good.
That’s why Hillary Clinton is making little headway with young voters. And why Obama and Bernie can’t help her. Bernie Sanders built his brand on appearing to take on the Clinton establishment. Now that he’s becoming part of that establishment, his brand is worthless. The same is true of Barack Obama.
They appeared to be agents of change because they ran against Hillary. But even though Hillary Clinton has recanted and contradicted her views so many times that she might as well be running against herself, she can’t actually do that. And that leaves her with nothing except desperate measures.
Shortly after she rigged the DNC to beat Bernie, she betrayed Democrats by detaching her anti-Trump efforts from their national election strategy. Instead of using Trump to attack the GOP, she instead began trying to win over Republicans by depicting Trump as the antithesis of the GOP. Democrats were furious at this latest betrayal from the Clintons, but Hillary was just chasing the available voters.
An older and more conservative electorate leaves her with diminished options. Hillary’s people know their ceiling among younger voters better than anyone else. Instead they are desperately trying to target the voters who are likely to show up. And those voters look very different than the Obama coalition.
Hillary Clinton is trying to do too many things at the same time. She transforms into a new politician for every audience. And all that does is alienate younger voters even more. No amount of celebrities or dot com voter registration drives can change the fact that younger voters can see how fake she is.
After decades of scheming, conniving and manipulating she was finally elected prom queen. But the tragedy is that no one wants to take Hillary to the prom.
