As I just pointed out, the only category of women that Hillary doesn’t do well in is women under the age of 30. Now, I kind-of find this hard to believe since among celebrity women she’s doing terrific with the Amy Schumers, Lena Dunhams, Natalie Portmans, and even Taylor Swifts, and it’s the women roughly in her age bracket like Susan Sarandon that seem to be the least on board.
But alas, the world is not always as the media portrays. And apparently very real voter data in Iowa says women under 30 voted her Bernie 2-to-1 over her. Anderson Cooper even asked about it during the recent town hall and Hillary seemed as surprised as anyone saying “That’s amazing.” Before anyone calls her something bad–as they so love to do–she said “young women don’t have to be for me, because I’m going to be for them.” I don’t think even a Washington Post hit piece could call that “talking down to young women” (so written by a middle-aged man).
Still, her campaign has no real answer for it, and I can see why they’d be baffled. Young “progressive” women will say—and have said 1000 times—that it’s because of economic issues and they can vote with their wallet like anyone else. And that is, of course, perfectly reasonable and makes perfect sense and—wait, what the hell? Millennial voters care about economic liberalism again? Since when?
For most of the Obama administration, except for the “The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Occupy Wall Street,” we have heard very little about economic liberalism. In fact, when “Occupy” went nowhere you might have been forgiven for thinking economic liberalism was all but dead, as there has not been a major push for unionization in this country in 50 years. There still isn’t. Most of the economic rhetoric in this campaign season has been co-opted into a strange “Free College”/”Break the Banks” hybrid that doesn’t actually address what working people–key word in that sentence being “work”–would do to improve their own jobs. Conditions on the job are still taking a backseat to figuring out ways to talk about money without really talking about money. [Expanded social security, free college, increased unemployment payments, more government assistance to poor may all be important but they don’t actually apply to people that are currently employed but underpaid due to union busting or the threatening “contractor economy.”]
The irony is that some believe what’s driving Trump’s campaign is a reaction to the political correctness and “safe zone” campus sensitivity that has been championed in large part by college-aged women, at least some of whom appear to be passionately supporting Bernie and joining in the villainization of Hillary. The same far-left culture that can write 40-paragraph think pieces for Jezebel about Sansa’s rape on Game of Thrones seems to be unsupportive of America’s first female president. I don’t blame Hillary’s supporters for saying “what gives?”