President Joe Biden’s pandering to young voters is embarrassing, especially when you realize he is pandering to the smallest pocket of young voters there is.
Biden and the Democratic Party view young voters as the key to their permanent dominance. As the hypothesis goes, any day now, generation after generation of young Democratic voters will dominate the voter pool and render the GOP extinct, a prediction that was likely being made before this writer was born. In reality, people change, which is why the 18-29-year-old voters who backed Barack Obama by 34 points in 2008 became 30-44-year-old voters who backed Biden in 2020 by just 7 points.
When you look at just how Biden is pandering and on what issues he is focusing, you see that he is doing nothing but following activist hype. A Harvard poll found that the top three most important issues according to people between the ages of 18 and 29 are inflation, healthcare, and housing. The youth issues that Biden and Democratic politicians focus on are student debt, Gaza, and climate change. So where do those rank?
Biden has continuously tried to abuse his power to erase student debt for predominantly wealthy graduates and postgraduates, but student debt ranks 16th out of 16 issues in Harvard’s poll, with just 26% of young voters saying it is a major issue. Biden’s pandering to the terrorist sympathizers on college campuses tackles Gaza, the 15th biggest issue out of 16 on the list. Climate change is the most popular of the three, and yet it sits in a tie for 12th with taxes, ranking behind immigration and crime.
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All of this is made even more silly when you realize that the Democratic dominance conferred by young voters is, as always, overrated. Biden won voters between the ages of 18 and 29 by 24 points in 2020, which is a large margin. It is also a slight increase over the 19-point advantage Hillary Clinton had in 2016. But those voters made up a larger share of the electorate in 2016 than 2020, and youth turnout is consistently underwhelming.
In other words, Biden is pandering to a smaller group of voters he already enjoys large margins from, and doing so with issues that rank far lower on their list of priorities than things such as the economy or housing. It is a pathetic level of desperation that has left Biden pandering to terrorist-supporting activists, among other things, because he thinks he needs to run up bigger margins to make up for just how unpopular he is. Perhaps the decision-making that led to this campaign choice is the problem in the first place.