Anyone who has paid any attention to this election or has spent any time on social media knows this obvious fact: Young people overwhelmingly support Bernie Sanders. I have been asked many times why I think that is the case and I have come up with a few reasons and just wanted to put it in writing. I assume everyone who will end up reading this post knows that I am a Hillary supporter. However, even I am insulted when people say that young people support Bernie because they “want free stuff”. As the primary process is winding down, I wanted to put forth a few factors that I believe influenced this popularity without being disparaging to my generation, because I felt these factors while choosing which candidate I prefer. Most of this revolves around recent history and the political timeline of my lifetime.

First, the connotation of the word “socialist”. I was born after the Cold War. For people my age, socialism isn’t tied to the nation’s number one enemy (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Additionally, we have spent the past 8 years hearing Republicans scream “socialist!” at Obama and it has become like Chicken Little screaming “the sky is falling!”, the effect has been dulled. In fact, Gallup’s weekly approval rating poll has had people between the ages of 18–29 giving Obama approval ratings between 58–70% for all of 2016. The scare tactics simply do not have the same effect on young people and their constant use during the Obama presidency has dulled whatever effect it may have had. This is directly shown in a poll taken in June 2015 showing 69% of young people would be fine voting for a socialist candidate, the national average: 47%. And keep in mind, this poll was taken at the beginning of June 2015, when Bernie was polling at approximately 11% (side note: Joe Biden was at 15% at this time). This poll is not a translation of Bernie’s personal popularity because he wasn’t popular yet. So now you have a candidate campaigning as a “democratic socialist” and there is simply not the same knee jerk reaction to the word “socialist” that there has been in years past. (Side note: I actually say Sanders is what is called a “social democrat” but he is running under the title of “democratic socialist” so we are dealing with the word “socialism”.)

Second, the rising cost of college. It is no secret that college costs have gone through the roof in recent decades. Meanwhile, states have been cutting their higher ed funding. This (obviously) affects younger people the most. “Free college” has been a central point of Sanders’s campaign. When 79% of people say that education beyond high school is not affordable for everyone in this country who needs it, and states are cutting funding, is it any surprise that making the line “free college” a central speaking point in his stump-speech gets a lot of traction? (Note: Clinton has a plan for debt-free college that — to get partisan — I actually prefer.) The simple fact is, just arguing for “free college” is an easy sell in this environment.

Third, for people my age the Iraq War is the biggest image of U.S. foreign intervention and foreign involvement and it is not a stretch to say that the Iraq War was a failure. 51% of people surveyed in June 2015 said it was a mistake and — I must admit — I actually thought that number would be higher. The Iraq War has left a lingering image in the minds of Americans, leading to a lack of confidence in our ability to intervene in foreign countries. Pew Research has conducted a poll since 1964 asking Americans if they think that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can. 2013 was the first time ever that the number of people who agreed with that statement was over 50% (52% to be precise). This can most easily be contributed to the failed U.S. interventions in the Middle East. Bernie’s entire foreign policy stance rests of the point that he voted no on the Iraq War. The war that seems to have lead to the shift in public opinion to favor non-interventionism for the first time since 1964 was the war that we grew up during and, on top of that, we became politically conscious while the Iraq War was unravelling and turning out to be a failure.

Now, something that really needs to be pointed out but Bernie supporters might not like hearing. Bernie Sanders has greatly benefitted from two and a half decades of Republican attacks on the Clintons. This needs to be addressed and recognized as we move toward the general election, considering Bernie is all but mathematically eliminated. To understand the Republican hatred of the Clintons we have to go back to a bunch of history that, like the Cold War, my generation did not experience.

The Clintons saved the Democratic Party from the brink of extinction. Since 1969 — when Lyndon B Johnson was president — until Bill Clinton in 1993, there had only been one democrat president — Jimmy Carter — and he failed to get reelected. So for over 2 decades the democrats were getting slaughtered. Nixon won in 1968 with over 300 electoral votes, then he followed that up in 1972 by winning in a landslide with over 500 electoral votes and carrying 49 states. The democratic nominee literally won 1 state and Washington DC (and this was the election where the Watergate Scandal occurred). Then you have Carter who beat Ford in 1976 but lost his reelection bid to Reagan who carried 44 states and got 489 electoral votes. Reagan followed that up with a landslide over Mondale who only won 1 state and DC. Then Bush crushed Dukakis and took 40 states. Then came Bill Clinton who defeated Bush, preventing him from getting re-elected. So the Democrats weren’t just losing, they were getting absolutely destroyed for the better part of two decades. No Republican from 1968 until Bill Clinton won an election with less than 300 electoral votes and only Nixon in ‘68 won with less than 400. Bill Clinton saved the party from irrelevance in presidential elections. I don’t think that my age group (born during Clinton’s presidency) really understands that. There would not be a Barack Obama if there were not the Clintons. Now with that history in mind, you can understand why the Clintons are enemy number one of the Republican Party.

The Republicans have been attacking the Clintons for 25 years and trying to tie as many scandals to them as possible and they never stick. Benghazi and the emails are just more of the same, in line with Whitewater and Vince Foster; it’s just Republicans trying to discredit the Clintons in any way they can. All of this is unfounded but it creates a feeling of distrust around Hillary. This, obviously not by any fault of Bernie’s, has helped Bernie immensely. My generation has known nothing but smear campaigns on the Clintons which has given us a massive feeling of distrust, we feel like there is something wrong there. There is now an automatic suspicion surrounding the Clintons, especially in people my age because we weren’t alive to see the big picture and the history of the Clintons and Republicans. And that is exactly the goal of the Republican attacks! To create this automatic feeling that something is wrong with them. The Clintons are enemy number one of the Republicans and they do not want them back in the White House.

Additionally, the New York Times released an article over a year ago titled “The Right Baits the Left to Turn Against Hillary Clinton” outlining how Conservative Super-PACs are going to try to discredit Hillary Clinton from the left. And again, this had absolutely nothing to do with Bernie Sanders, the same day that the article was written, a poll was conducted where Bernie was polling at just under 5%. The goal of this is to undermine the liberal base of the Democratic Party that Clinton needs to win, erode what should be her natural core of support, and — in the words of the president of the Conservative Super-PAC “American Crossroads” — “It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time. And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.” At this time, Clinton was leading Sanders among voters who considered themselves “very liberal” by 46%, with Clinton getting 61% of “very liberal” voters and Sanders getting 15%. The goal of these Super-PACs was to change that, and it seems they were successful. I would argue that the goal of these Super-PACs stems from the 2000 election. And again, the 2000 election is something none of us experienced and understood at the time. In the 2000 election, Al Gore (Bill Clinton’s Vice President) ran against George W. Bush and lost because he lost Florida. This election was such a mess that it went before the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court rejected Gore’s plea for a manual recount of votes. The published vote count had George W. Bush winning by 537 votes in Florida out of about 6 million cast. Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate to the left of Gore, got about 97,500 votes in Florida. Many people argue that if Ralph Nader was not in the election, George W. Bush would not have won. Now take this back to the Clinton’s history with Republicans, this means that the tide has shifted and the only Republican president since 1988 became president in one of the most controversial and close elections in U.S. history and potentially the only reason they won is because votes were taken away from the left of the Democratic candidate. Why not attempt to do that again?

The result of these campaigns by Republicans is people saying that Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy, even though for this entire campaign Politifact has rated her as the most honest candidate. This is how you get people saying she is basically a Republican, even though — according to ideology scores — she is running slightly to the left of Obama and to the left of Bernie on issues such as guns. This is how we get young, smart, self-identified feminists saying they would never vote for Hillary Clinton or “we need a female president, just not Hillary” without understanding the role Hillary has played in advancing women’s rights in previous years. Additionally, Hillary Clinton was the first presidential candidate to use the term “intersectional”, showing she has kept up with the new terminology and emerging theories that my generation has widely accepted, but if you tell that to someone they’ll say she is just pandering. Why? Because we have been primed to assume that Hillary Clinton is conniving, manipulative, and deceitful and reject the simple answer, which is that she is an intelligent person who understands the changing world and has been at the forefront of the women’s rights movement for decades.

It is absolutely fine and even necessary to disagree with candidates and presidents on any issue. I actually recommend it, ideological purity is a dangerous thing to be seeking. However, if your automatic assumption is that Hillary Clinton is manipulative, you may be a product of decades of Republican strategy. (Side note: examine a lot of the behaviors Hillary Clinton has and how people describe them, then imagine those attributes on a man. They probably do not get described in the same way and are viewed as positives in men. But that is a topic I will write about another time.) You may be no different than the people who watch Fox News and then say that Obama is a terrible speaker, when that is certifiably false. The people who watch Fox believe that because they aren’t looking at Obama as himself, instead they are viewing Obama through a lens, a lens created by Republican attacks. The same kind of attacks they’ve been using on the Clintons for decades that we have have grown up seeing. As we move toward the general election we must look at exactly where our opinions of Hillary Clinton are coming from. If you have a disagreement based on ideology and role of government then that is fine but if you see yourself automatically assuming an ulterior motive every time Hillary Clinton does something, then examine that and try to find out exactly where that is stemming from. Chances are, it is stemming from Republicans.