The Democratic Party Can't Win The 18-29 Demographic And Here's Why

Two major obstacles prevent the democratic party from winning young voters -- messaging and agenda

A lot of worry is spreading around social media about Joe Biden’s chances in the upcoming general election. He can’t win over the 18-29 demographic for a variety of reasons, at least according to the doomerism inherent to Twitter pundits, not the least of which has to do with the war on Palestine. So first, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: middle east policy from the Democrats in office.

The obvious notwithstanding problem for the Democratic party is that there’s been over 30,000 deaths in Gaza, with 2.2 million people displaced and facing an unprecedented famine. The majority of those killed are women and children. At least 26 hospitals have been bombed into inoperation. Insulin and cancer drugs can’t make it into the borders of the country due to Israeli blockade, and the United States government has opted to censure UNRWA — United Nations Relief and Works Agency — instead of supporting their efforts to get aid into the country. Instead of telling the Israeli government to back down, the U.S. put nearly $250 million worth of emergency arms funding in their pockets in December of 2023, much to the chagrin of progressives who spent the better part of the previous two months advocating for an immediate ceasefire. The Democrats currently in office won’t use the word genocide to refer to the onslaught, are still extensively denouncing Hamas in no unclear terms, and predominantly refuse to call for any kind of reduction in hostilities between the two combatants despite the outsize civilian suffering that’s come to define the conflict.

The messaging from the party has basically been the same as the jingoistic fervor that defined the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan: put simply, no amount of wanton destruction or excessive civilian death tolls will put their bloodlust at ease, and only the full and complete destruction of the opposite side will end the conflict. Young Americans, who grew up through both of these senseless wars, came to regard them much the way the youth regarded the war on Vietnam. It’s no surprise that this voting block feels the same about the violence being perpetrated by our government when it so closely aligns with the violence they enacted over the course of the previous two decades. Some less than conservative estimates of the civilian death tolls between the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that as many as a million people perished due to the occupation between the two countries. The Democratic party, on the other hand, both refuses to acknowledge this as a facet of the voting block’s interests while simultaneously upholding the interests of the military industrial complex and oil magnates the world over. Instead of acquiescing to the demands of the electorate, the party charges forward, marching to the beat of a corporate drum that demands ritual sacrifice. That ritual sacrifice happens to be brown people overseas, as well as their access to the untapped natural resources of the middle east.

This is, in part, where the first part of the problem lies: their agenda. Do Democrats want to protect abortion rights? Do they want to eliminate tax loopholes for the incredibly wealthy? Do they have any desire to create affordable housing and mass public transit? Is there anybody in the party with a realistic end goal of expanding medical resources to all those without access? And ultimately, do they have any interest in reducing the amount of bloodshed done at the hands of the military for the sake of their defense contractors’ profiteering and line graphs? These are all overwhelmingly popular policy decisions. Poll after poll after poll for the 18-29 demographic says that they want the party to come further left on every one of these issues, not to mention climate policy, gun control, immigration, public works projects, you name it. The stated agenda of the Democratic party only partially addresses these issues, coming just far enough left to appease a moderate voting block in the hopes that they won’t alienate too many people in the center, believing them to be the glue that keeps them in power. And, coming as a surprise to no one, they manage to alienate the very voting block they frequently say they need to win elections — the 18-29s whose voter turnout seems implausibly low — because they can never commit to sustainable policy that would draw them into civic participation.

See, this is really where the party fucks up: they dedicate themselves to an incrementalist approach that inevitably gets reversed by a mixture of congressional gridlock and Republican efforts to undermine the government. They take a lukewarm approach to every policy they put forward. It’s part of why the Affordable Care Act is simultaneously lauded by liberals and scorned by leftists to this very day. 26 million Americans remain uninsured in the U.S., with another 10 million or so considered underinsured. Don’t get me wrong — it’s great that the party managed to insure millions of people and remove discrimination due to pre-existing conditions — but it wasn’t enough. It stands to reason that while this was the best the party was capable of doing, and they faced Republican opposition at every turn, they still failed to bring the ultimate progressive policy goal to fruition, which leaves the 18-29 demographic feeling betrayed for the umpteenth time. You can take any serious policy decision made by the Democrats in the last twenty years, and every one of them feels exactly like this one.

Look no further than the student loan crisis. Everyone progressive was asking for total forgiveness, and then Warren advocated for $50,000 on the campaign trail in 2020. When Biden got into office, that number had dropped to $15,000 (or $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients) and was narrower in scope than before. Then it was lowered to $10,000, but only for people who had been paying their loans for ten years, while the executive branch focused its efforts on forgiving people who had been cheated out of their degrees or charged excessive amounts by private colleges. Flash forward half a decade, and the total amount of student loan debt that’s been forgiven makes up less than 10% of the country’s total outstanding debt. This is also the compromise solution: higher education isn’t being made free, we’re just forgiving the debt after people take it on, so the actual problem continues in perpetuity. Until and unless the party makes a big decision about how to fix things for the better, they’re not going to get credit from the younger generation for what they do with means tested programs.

Abortion could have been codified into law multiple times through multiple administrations in the last forty years and Democrats decided to leave that matter to the courts. It inevitably blew up in their faces, and now part of their messaging for the next election is “vote for us and we’ll do that thing we should have done a long time ago”. The Supreme Court, as well as many of the Appellate Courts, have been completely captured by the last fifteen years of the Republican project, but the Democratic party has no interest in packing the courts with their own nominees. They do what they can to appoint federal judgeships, sure, but it’s not like they’re purging any of the conservative nominations through impeachment.

This is where we get to the second major problem Democrats are facing: messaging. Appointing nominees to federal courts is a largely invisible policy decision that Democrats a) never seem to publicize to the people in their voting demographics and b) wouldn’t win a lot of voters over to their side because it’s a complex bureaucratic issue that doesn’t play like sweeping policy changes would. Changes to federal zoning law that affects Section 8 housing, tweaks to the tax code that allow small agribusiness to compete with large agritech firms, removal of arcane and or byzantine laws on the books that made sense fifty years before the advent of computers: these are all part and parcel for the rank and file members of the American bureaucracy, and make up a substantial portion of the job legislative members are expected to perform when elected to congress. What they don’t do is convince people in the younger generation, who are largely fed up with the way American bureaucracy repeatedly tells them “no”, to get out of their houses and run to the polls. It’s invisible! Even when Democrats make it a point to talk up their legislative accomplishments in their little newsletters and talk at length about how they’re staunch defenders of the American project, they’re mostly doing lip service for themselves. They’re not really getting anything done at scale, they’re just cutting red tape in a few places and then patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

This is where the big divide between pundits, legislators, and regular voters comes in. Pundits and legislators will tell you, at length, that there’s nothing that can be done to change the way the system functions. That the way the system functions is sacred, impeccable, irreplaceable. Many voters in the 18-29 demographic rightly regard this as a complete load of shit. The way that we’ve been doing things in modern American governance is really only around a hundred years old, and when unprecedented problems were facing the government and its people, unprecedented solutions were needed. We, the people, need extensive and complete change now, not ten to fifteen years from now. We need federal background checks on gun purchases, protections for transgender health care, equal and safe access to abortion. We need the student loan crisis, and the housing crisis, and the crisis in Gaza to be resolved in the immediate future, not some distant point in time that nobody can predict. And, most of all, we need a Democratic party that acknowledges and attempts to solve these issues instead of one that attempts to pay lip service to people who have a vested interest in seeing them continue. Maybe it’s just because there’s so much dark money in politics, or maybe our politicians are all just gormless shitheels, but either way, something’s got to give.

It’s incrementalism, through and through; small, microevolutionary changes to the system with the hope that they’ll eventually add up to one greater whole and allow the macroevolutionary process to do its thing. Unfortunately, the Republican opposition in congress is dedicated to not only reversing as much of this progress as humanly possible, but also to destroying the advent of American bureaucracy at its core. When Democrats make 10% headway on the student loan crisis, and five years down the line Republicans remove all the protections put in place by the Higher Education Act, we’ll be back at square one. It would have taken ten to twenty years for the Dems to properly address the crisis in its entirety, but now it will take longer, because the left wingers will never have consistent control over this country so long as they refuse to adhere to progressive policy and decision making.