PrintGroovy Joe courts the youth vote
Joe Biden is courting the youth vote for his 2024 re-election campaign, telling young voters how great he's been for them and all but getting out his groovy shirt, too.
According to the Washington Examiner:
President Joe Biden confusing Taylor Swift and Britney Spears may have been funny, but a continued inability to connect with young people, especially young Democrats, will not be a laughing matter for his reelection campaign next year.
...and...
Biden's campaign is mindful of the president's enthusiasm gap, amplifying a story Wednesday about how young people are "furious" with and "frightened" by Trump promising, again, to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare permits those under 26 to remain covered by their parents' healthcare insurance plans.
...
Biden himself emailed about 813,000 federal student borrowers this week to remind them that their loans were forgiven by his administration. A White House official promoted the move, emphasizing how Biden has canceled $127 billion in debt for almost 3.6 million people.
Eeewwww.
That alone is reason enough not to vote for him.
Biden's student loan forgiveness, which might not happen anyway owing to court challenges, is quite the quid pro quo demand for young borrowers. He didn't wipe out the taxpayer-paid loans because he wanted to -- he just did it to pander to young voters. It probably creeps some of them out that he got into their email to send the appeal -- where'd he get their email addresses from?
If he thinks that will put him over the top, he's sadly mistaken. Young voters hate Joe Biden by the largest of all margins, according to a very recent TIPP poll, and they are like a brick wall in thinking Biden is "too old" to run for president anyway.
But the real issue is the economy,
According to another article on TIPP Insights:
The Biden economy has been so disastrous to 18-24-year-olds that they may switch their allegiance to former President Trump in 2024 if he clinches the GOP nomination. James Carville's famous political axiom, "It's the economy, stupid!" applies just as well today as it did in 1991 when Carville forced the Bill Clinton war room to focus on Bush 41's handling of the economy and helped Clinton win the presidency.
Biden's youth-vote appeal went to quite a small segment of the voting population, and as word of this email note gets around, it's likely to anger other voters, including those in the youth demographic. Think of how many young borrowers never did get the Biden loan forgiveness because they paid off their loans, or didn't get hired as government bureaucrats doing "public service," or never borrowed in the first place.
Young people just entering the workforce are hit hardest by the ravages of jobs evaporating, and a coming recession is "baked in the cake." Wages have already fallen owing to Bidenflation, and they are down for lack of job creation except in the bureaucrat world, too.
The Examiner cites one expert who believes this is what's really going on:
But pollster David Paleologos advised against pigeonholing young people as single-issue voters, whether regarding the Israel-Hamas war, climate, or student loans. They additionally care about the economy and inflation, according to Paleologos, director of Suffolk University's Political Research Center.
"In our last national poll, young people trusted Donald Trump more to handle the economy, 51%-41%, over Joe Biden," Paleologos told the Washington Examiner. "But, among these same young voters in a ballot test, Biden led by 3 points, 35%-32%. The difference? Independent candidate RFK, who pulled young voters away from Trump."
"Both scenarios are bad for Biden currently, either more young voters voting for Trump or more young voters voting third-party, because it's one less vote for Biden and reduces the advantage Biden should have in this key age voting bloc," he said. "That's a far cry from the 24-point thumping Biden gave to Trump among those ages 18-29 years, 60%-36%, in the 2020 election."
I think he's right.
The economy, unlike global warming, or the Hamas cause, is up close, oersonal, and affects young people just as they are starting out in life.
It's not just that jobs are hard to find and wages are bad -- it's that everyone is being told to scale down, do with less, live more poorly than their parents did, not have babies, go green, ride the bus, rent a small, cramped apartment like the Europeans do...
Small is beautiful and sustainability is everything and wanting anything else out of life is wicked and right-wing.
Consumption is out, and virtue-signaling is in. Minimizing one's carbon footprint by doing with less is one's goal in life.
Joe Biden pats himself on the back about keeping young people on their parents' insurance until the age of 26 as if that's something they're really happy about, having to consult maw and paw before going to the doc and answer whatever questions they may have about 'why' instead of just being able to get a job with a good salary and its own health care benefits. Sound like something to brag about?
I remember what the Jimmy Carter years were like as a young person, and even with all the crises that Carter created, the sanctimonious calls to young people to do with less, to expect to never get a job, to content oneself with being poor, was a wake-up call to young people in my day to reject that hideous gasbag and vote for Ronald Reagan.
We were right, as we soon learned when Ronald Reagan won.
Now history is repeating itself. The past is not dead -- to paraphrase William Faulkner -- it's not even the past. Or to take the recent example of James Carville's memorable sayings: "It's the economy, stupid."
No amount of getting hip and 'with it' for young voters is going to fix young voters for Joe Biden with that Biden economy around.
Image: The Office of James Carville, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0
