Can Bernie woo young voters to Clinton? Sanders headlines campus rallies to find out

MADISON, Wis. — Ethan Soderberg, a senior at University of Wisconsin-Madison, only plans to vote for Hillary Clinton if the election is close. The Green Party’s Jill Stein is his preferred candidate.

“I don’t think she’s as progressive as she portrays herself to be,” Soderberg said of Clinton. “She tries to go off and say she’s always been that way.” In contrast, he said Stein is “more about change.”

Soderberg isn’t alone. Over a third of Wisconsin voters age 18 to 29 said they would vote for a third-party candidate like Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson, according to the most recent Marquette University Law School poll of the swing state. This is despite the fact that Republican Donald Trump is deeply unpopular with such voters.

Clinton’s campaign is hoping to win over skeptical millennial voters in part by deploying key surrogates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to campuses in order to boost support for the Democratic nominee and down-ballot candidates. Indeed, Sanders has been on a whirlwind tour of universities in the final weeks before Election Day.

“Secretary Clinton and I reached an agreement on a proposal which says that public colleges and universities will be tuition-free for every family in America earning less than $125,000 a year. That’s 83 percent of our population!” Sanders said to cheers here at UW-Madison.

“I want our young people to be leaving school with excitement, going out getting the jobs they want, not just the jobs they need in order to pay off their student debt,” he continued. “I want to see young people be able to go out and start the businesses that their hearts are directing them to — not have to struggle decade after decade with horrible levels of student debt.”

College students and young professionals helped cement victory for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Over 60 percent of young voters supported Obama in his reelection campaign, and a similar number of those are supporting Clinton: In a recent USA Today/Rock the Vote poll, 62 percent of likely millennial voters said they would back Clinton.

But voters aged 18 to 24 are not supporting Clinton with the same kind of zeal they showed in 2012. Almost half of those surveyed in the USA Today poll said they didn’t feel as though their vote mattered. Two-thirds of those who said they would not vote cited their dislike of the available candidates on the ballot.

Voter enthusiasm in that poll was highest in March, when Sanders, a septuagenarian but a favorite among young voters, was making a push for the Democratic nomination and easily won states like Wisconsin against Clinton. A Gallup poll from May showed that 82 percent of millennial voters had a favorable view of Sanders. Over half preferred him to Clinton or Trump.

Colin Seeberger, a campaign adviser with Young Invincibles, told Yahoo News that Sanders won over young people by addressing the issues they felt are the most pressing in their lives. His organization researches and advocates on issues relevant to millennial voters.

“What is very obvious is Sen. Sanders talked about issues important to our generation,” Seeberger said. “College affordability, health care, jobs that set people up for financial security. That really resonates with young voters. Young people are looking for candidates that understand the unique challenges they face.”

One of those young people is Zach

Druckrey, a senior at UW-Madison and one of the founders of Badgers for Bernie, a group dedicated to promoting Sanders’ candidacy on the campus. The group organized for Sanders en route to his dominating victory in Wisconsin’s April primary, in which the Vermont senator won all but one county statewide and beat Clinton by 25 points in the Madison-anchored Dane County.

Druckrey said his group also traveled to Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota to register voters and generate excitement about Sanders’ candidacy. It was the first time he had delved into political organizing.

“Bernie didn’t say he had all the answers. He explicitly said it is as much about us as it was for him,” Druckrey said. “It was great. … It’s really powerful to hear that.”

While Druckrey was disappointed that Sanders came up short in the primary, he said he would support Clinton, pointing to the risk of a Trump presidency.

“The alternative is unthinkable,” he said. “It’s not worth voting [for a third party] because it could lead to a Trump presidency.”

But there is a clear level of uneasiness with Clinton. In a recent study conducted by the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, almost a quarter of the 1,200 young voters surveyed even said they would prefer a meteor strike to a Trump or Clinton presidency, though some respondents undoubtedly gave that answer tongue-in-cheek.

Joshua Dyck, co-director of UMass’ Lowell Center for Public Opinion, said the results show a unique level of dissatisfaction that was not present in 2012.

“We do not take our respondents at their word that they are earnestly interested in seeing the world end, but we do take their willingness to rank … a giant meteor ahead of these two candidates with startling frequency as a sign of displeasure and disaffection with the candidates and the 2016 election,” Dyck said in an analysis of the poll results.

Sanders has been making the rounds on college campuses to assuage those concerns with Clinton and rail against Trump.

“If you still have any doubts about who the best candidate is,” Sanders told students in Madison, compare Clinton’s and Trump’s positions on climate change. “Donald Trump believes climate change is a ‘hoax’ created by ‘the Chinese.’ Why ‘the Chinese,’ I’m not quite sure. I would have thought [he’d blame] ‘the Mexicans’ or ‘the Muslims,’” he added to laughter.

Some of his most frequent stops have been college towns, including Duluth, Minn., Tucson, Ariz., and Ann Arbor, Mich. Sanders and Warren, another progressive icon, made their first joint appearance Sunday at the University of Colorado-Denver.

“We’re going to beat Trump and we’re going to beat him badly, and we’re going to elect Hillary Clinton,” Sanders told students in Denver.

At a Wednesday stop at the University of Nevada-Reno, Sanders echoed some of the key pieces of his primary campaign: income inequality, universal health care and college affordability. But the undercurrent of his latest speech is now centered on how Clinton and a Democratic Senate could make those progressive goals a reality.

“We are going to elect the best people we can, and we are going to hold those people accountable, and we are going to implement the most progressive platform in the history of the United States,” Sanders told the crowd of over 500 people in Reno, Nev.

Druckrey, the Badgers for Bernie founder, said there is a persisting trust among many of his student peers for Sanders, which makes him an effective surrogate.

“The idea is that none of the things he said doesn’t matter anymore but that now … he says we have to vote for Hillary to keep away the unthinkable,” he said. “Which I totally understand. There aren’t a lot of people mad at Bernie. Most of us believe him that this is what we need to do. People have grown to trust the guy and what’s he done in the last year.”

And despite some tempered enthusiasm, Seeberger believes that young people have been highly engaged in the 2016 election cycle, either on social media or by organizing for the candidates and issues they support.

“The ability of this generation to flex its political muscle has never been greater,” he said. “There is the opportunity for young people to make a mark.”