Since the mid-term election, Pelosi is particularly commended for his ability to maneuver to ensure the House's presidency and his aggressive jousts with Trump during the government's closure. But the rigid and largely masked television response of the two leaders – an immediate target for late-night comics – quickly reopened the question of whether the Democrats' national leadership is too old. This is not a useful backdrop for Biden, 76, as he approaches the decision to run for the presidential nomination for 2020.
A familiar face against a newcomer to a young coalition
Debate on the age of the party leadership is likely to become more keen over the next year, both when the nomination process will heat up and as democrats in Congress will intensify their confrontations with Trump. On both fronts, the party faces the same paradox: almost all the most familiar and powerful faces of Democrats are grizzled, while it is increasingly dependent on young voters to win elections.
This disjunction may make the question of whether Democrats can do this more acute. maximize the mobilization of their younger and younger coalition without a leadership that better reflects it. Heather Hargreaves, executive director of NextGen America, the group founded by Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer to get more young people involved in politics, said that to reach young voters, the party's message is more important than the current one. age of his messengers.
But she adds, "Do I think that in the long run the Democratic Party needs to make more changes?" There must be some responsibility for the fact that it is the young people who catapult them. in power, and they should think about it. "
The democratic advantage of young voters has become an indispensable part of their electoral strategy, especially since Trump directs his message so closely to older whites blue and evangelical.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 14 percentage points among voters under age 45 and nine points among seniors, according to the CNN exit poll.
In the mid-term elections of 2018, Democratic H The candidates have significantly increased their advantage among young people: they have won two-thirds of voters aged 18 to 29 and nearly three-fifths of those aged 30 at age 44, according to surveys conducted at the exit of CNN. This is the best performance for Democrats in both age groups for election to the House since at least 1986. Republicans, on the other hand, had very little benefit among voters aged over 45 years old.
A millennial wave
The considerable democratic gains have considerably diminished last November. the age profile of party members in the House. Prior to the elections, according to figures provided by Drew DeSilver, senior editor of the Pew Research Center, Democrats had only one member (Tulsi Gabbard in Hawaii) of the Millennial generation (whom Pew defines as youngsters born to 1981 to 1996). more than Generation X (born from 1965 to 1980). This means that the youngest two generations represented less than a quarter of the House's democratic caucus, a percentage even lower than about a third of their membership in the House of Republicans last year.
But November's results swept through a torrent of young people. Democrats. DeSilver calculated that in the new Congress, the Democratic caucus would have 16 Millennials and 72 Generation X members. The youngest two generations now represent more than 37 percent of the total Democrat caucus (about the same proportion as the Republicans). Baby boomers rose from about three-fifths of House Democrats before the election to just over half; the old "silent generation" has risen from about one in six to one in 9.
The generational split is not an ideological split
The gap between the generations Democrats are often equated with the ideological split of the party. the last does not always follow the first one. The Democratic representatives of the Millennium Congress include the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who quickly became one of the party's most virulent liberals, but also Colin Lamb of Pennsylvania and Collin Allred of Texas, two young centrists in the making. Among the candidates in the 2020 presidential election, the oldest candidates include two of the most prominent centrists (former Vice President Biden and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) , as well as two of the most ardent liberals (Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.) "Matt Bennett, vice president of public relations for Centrist Democratic group Third Way (1965), points out Matt Bennett.
The differences between the oldest and youngest generations within the party may be more related to accessibility, the style of communication (with newer generations much more commonly in new forms of social media), and different assumptions, rooted in different generational experiences, how Democrats can aggressively pursue their goals without provoking feedback, in part icular on social issues. For example, some critics are questioning a candidacy for the Biden presidency, as it would spur the Bill Clinton's heartbreaking debates on the party's course on issues such as crime and well-being, while he was much more dependent on blue-collar workers. White voters.
