Rahm Emanuel is worried. The former mayor of Chicago, White House chief of staff, and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was once a leading voice of his party. But now the 60-year-old centrist icon is an investment banker—he once made $16 million for two years of work—and finds himself at odds with his party’s progressive electorate, particularly younger voters hungry for systemic change. In recent weeks, Emanuel has gone on a one-man media blitz begging his party to support a moderate candidate for president, as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders builds momentum toward the nomination.

Sanders is an “ideological risk,” whose “candidacy is built on a false premise” and who’s saying “forget that, screw it” to the traditional playbook, Emanuel bemoaned recently on CBS This Morning, The View, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And he’s not alone.

James Carville, Emanuel’s teammate on Bill Clinton’s victorious 1992 presidential campaign, is angry. Nearly three decades after that career-defining election, the legendary strategist is now 75, the beneficiary of lucrative TV, speaking, and book deals, and opines on private-jet travel, one “of his favorite subjects.” He, too, finds himself out of step with the party he once influenced. If you think Sanders can win, Carville declared in one of many recent TV eruptions, “you’re a fool” and “as stupid to a political scientist as a climate denier is to an atmospheric scientist."

Amid the Sanders surge, other veteran pundits are gasping for air too. Donny Deutsch, MSNBC’s 62-year-old Morning Joe mainstay who sold his advertising firm for a cool $265 million, declared himself “absolutely panicked” by the senator’s electoral success. Then there’s 74-year-old Chris Matthews, who at one point reportedly pulled in $5 million a year and who apologized last week to Sanders after famously comparing his win in Nevada to Nazis taking over France in World War II.

What are they missing?

As Carville might say: the economy, stupid. To understand the worldview of younger voters—Sanders won approximately half of voters under 30 in Iowa and New Hampshire and doubles his nearest competitor among the same group nationally—look at their economic prospects, which are a world away from $265 million deals and private-jet travel. And if you’re looking at the prospects of today’s young adults, the issue you cannot escape is student debt.

With studies showing college degrees more essential for professional success than ever before, today's young adults were told that to have a decent life, they had to get that diploma. So, they did the “right” thing: worked hard, got accepted to college, and at 17, took out loans for tens of thousands of dollars that to a teenager seemed like Monopoly money. With guidance counselors assuring them that everyone got these loans, and that they’d be easy to pay down later, tens of millions signed paperwork with fine print that may as well have been written in Wingdings.

Making matters worse, tuition and associated expenses (room and board, textbooks, etc.) were exponentially higher for millennials and Generation Z than in the old days. The average four-year price tag now (including for public schools) is well over $100,000, with tuition rising nearly eight times faster than wages. The memories older Americans have of working their way through college and graduating with no debt are distant ones (the average tuition in the early 1970s in today’s dollars was $2,175 per year for in-state public schools and $9,876 for public ones). According to reports, a college education is now likely to be the second-largest expense an American will make in their lifetime, second only to purchasing a home (which itself has become largely unaffordable for younger Americans).