Hillary Clinton is an unquestioned pioneer—no woman has ever been president, or come anywhere near as close as she has. To many older feminists—the generation who lived through Women’s Lib, fought for Title IX and can quote The Feminine Mystique—this is a profound and galvanizing moment. The prize is in sight. Finally, young women across the country have the chance to finish the job their mothers and grandmothers started, and help vault Clinton into office. For those women who think otherwise, “there’s a special place in hell,” as Madeleine Albright put it this week.

But so far, the opposite appears to be happening: In New Hampshire’s primary, Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old white man, won 53 percent of the female vote, compared with Clinton’s 46 percent. And his numbers among young women were astonishing: 82 percent of women under age 30 supported him. What’s going on here? Why are millennial women giving up on Clinton? We asked a wide range of women—younger, older, in between, feminists and not—to deliberate on that question. Clinton’s shot at history just might depend on the answer.


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If she were black, or gay, or poor, young liberals might be more inclined to vote for her.

Molly Roberts is a senior at Harvard University and columnist for the Harvard Crimson.

Hillary Clinton’s presidency would be epochal—the first time in 227 years of American history that a woman would lead the White House’s West Wing rather than the East. So why do young people see this election cycle’s “outsider” as another gray-haired white guy?

There’s more to it than just young people’s attraction to radical change. Feminism has changed, especially on campus, and among the left-leaning. The fact is, among certain segments of the liberal millennial population, Clinton’s gender is simply not enough to make her a groundbreaker. She might be a woman, but she is also white, and well-off, and straight. If she were black, or gay, or poor—as well as female, some young liberals might be more inclined to vote for her.

To many on the left, Clinton’s gender is simply not enough to make her exciting. She doesn’t belong to enough categories of disenfranchised people.

When I wrote a column recently for the Harvard Crimson explaining why I think many young women don’t like Clinton—and why they should—I got pushback from people who thought I was focusing too much on Clinton’s gender and not enough on the ways in which, despite being a woman, she has a leg up on most Americans. One online comment read: “Establishment Harvard student exhorts her peers to support establishment Democratic candidate.” Another critique came in a Facebook status accusing me of ignoring the perspectives of minorities.

This vein of criticism is part of a concept that’s been around since the 1980s but just recently come into campus vogue—“intersectionality.” The word is shorthand for the idea that it’s impossible to separate social identities, or the oppression that surrounds them. Clinton may be a woman, but she is also white—and thus privileged. When Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright stand up for Clinton and urge young women to get behind her, they seem understandably shocked that women aren’t rallying together to help break through another final, uncracked pane of the glass ceiling. When a modern campus feminist watches the same scene, she sees a group of older, privileged white women circling the wagons around one of their own.

To many on the left, then, Clinton’s gender is simply not enough to make her exciting. She doesn’t belong to enough categories of disenfranchised people. In fact, some argue, the ways Clinton does fit into the establishment outweigh the way she doesn’t. Maybe it’s easier for people in a generation where more women than men are graduating from college to forget how difficult it once was to be female in the United States. The focus on hardship has shifted from sex to privilege as the country has moved forward on gender equality.

But, when women still struggle for equal pay and equal representation in government and industry, I’d argue that the country hasn’t moved forward far enough. Though it’s important that women be represented by black women, queer women and poor women, it’s surprising to me that, before any woman has even made it close to the White House, so many are spending time finding fault with the kind of woman who just might get there.

(This response has been condensed from a full article. To read more about what young feminists think about Clinton, click here.)

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Young women don’t yet see the breadth of her vision.

Gail Sheehy is the author of 17 books, including a biography of Hillary Clinton, Hillary’s Choice.

“I just don’t know what to do anymore!” Hillary Clinton blurted out. “It’s not me they hate—it’s the changes I represent. I’m the wife who went back to school and got a degree and landed a job better than his.”

She said this to me after I followed her into the ladies room at a Renaissance Weekend retreat in 1994. At the time, the first lady was being blamed for the Democrats’ devastating defeat in midterm elections. Blamed for being the other half of a two-for-the-price-of one presidency, in which she had been put in charge of health care reform. She had dared to propose for the first time in American history a national health care plan, which she now refers to as “Hillarycare.” It took another 20 years before Obamacare became law. That’s the kind of timetable we face in fighting for every progressive government action.

But that startling confession could also have been uttered this week, more than two decades later, by a two-time presidential candidate roundly rejected in New Hampshire—not only by white male working class men but by the most progressive women of a promising new generation.

Millennial women cannot imagine such a long-term perspective. At their ages, 18 to 34, they want change NOW. So did their mothers back in the 70s, 80s, 90s and today, fatigued from 40 years of fighting for equal pay, but more ferocious than ever in fighting to preserve the human rights that women have won. They listen to their daughters’ idealistic hopes for a political revolution and try to bite their tongues. The revolution in consciousness that must precede that upheaval is not yet broad enough to shatter the status quo. Boomer women who still support Hillary Clinton (and it’s not all of them—many feel ambivalent about her) see in her the leader with the toughness and experience to finally unleash the full economic force of working women. Nothing would do more to achieve an economic revolution in this country.

New Window OPTICS: Covering Hillary: A Visual History (click to view photo gallery)

I have spoken to a lot of millennial women about Clinton. Many dismiss her for “gaining her power through a man.” They don’t know her history. It took a Hillary to raise a president. And it took a Bill to make his wife a co-president. They have always been partners in power and aligned in fighting for economic and social justice. That symbiosis has allowed the Clintons to dominate Democratic politics for a quarter of a century—longer even than Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt.

I like to take millennials back to Hill and Bill in their twenties, at Yale Law School. It was she who worked up all the research to develop their argument in the final case presentation, while Bill goofed off. He stepped in at the last minute, Mr. Charisma, and performed for the audience. It was Hillary Rodham, fresh out of law school, who was offered a prestigious job in Washington on the Watergate Committee, which impeached a president, while Bill Clinton went back to Arkansas to lose his first congressional election. But Hillary saw he had “it.” And once she took over as his fight manager, she knew how to channel his native gifts, battle his enemies and, yes, bury the evidence of his many personal betrayals in denial.

What young women may not fully appreciate in the possibility of this woman as president is her inclusiveness. Millennials’ greatest gift to our society is their diversity. They not only accept the “other” more naturally than any previous generation, they are intermarrying and blending our racial and ethnic DNA in ways that hold out great promise for innovation and creativity in the future.

Hillary, more than anyone else, appreciates diversity, because she, too, is still an “other.”

In last night’s Democratic debate, candidate Clinton showed no signs of weakness after a defeat that would have thrown most people into despair or Xanax. She gave Bernie Sanders his argument—“You’re right” about Wall Street, drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all having too much influence. “But if that were to stop tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the neglect we saw in Flint … the racism holding people back, sexism preventing women from getting equal pay, LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the long distance runner in this race. Young women may yet see the breadth of her vision, which includes much more than income redistribution. She has the battle scars that can make her indomitable in the face of Republican assaults on social progress.

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This a not young woman v. old woman catfight.

Sady Doyle is a freelance journalist and blogger.

Hillary Clinton does not have a “young women” problem; what Hillary Clinton has is a “young people” problem. This is a vital distinction. Over 80 percent of people under age 30 voted for Sanders in New Hampshire. Not all of them were female. In fact, framing this as a “young women” versus “old women” fight not only drags us into a morass of ancient misogynist tropes, it obscures some of the more notable identity politics in play, and prevents us from making any real analysis (feminist or otherwise) of how the split works.

For instance, Clinton’s supposed “young women” problem is taking place in a context where she not only gained the majority of the female vote in Iowa, she actually did better with Iowa women in 2016 than she did in 2008; it is taking place in a context where most of the “young” voters to date have been white; it is taking place in a context where female New Hampshire voters did indeed split for Sanders, but where men voted for Sanders over Clinton by a margin of nearly 2-to-1. And there is the startling fact that one group of 18-29 year olds is just as likely to support Clinton as any other age group: Parents of daughters.

None of which you would know by taking the temperature of Internet chatter, where the Sanders v. Clinton debate is being split into two monolithic all-female blocs and framed as a generational battle over whether (a) the young, lovely and virtuous co-eds of the world will rise up to defeat those rapidly withering second-wave bitches once and for all, or (b) these girls today are so ungrateful and ignorant and boy-crazy they’d stab Bella Abzug to death in the public square to ensure perpetual male dominance and we slaved away over a hot stove all day to get you those reproductive rights and this is how you talk to us young lady go to your room.

Dear Lord. There are plenty of reasons a young college student today might support Sanders. For one thing, Sanders has built more of his platform around positions that openly court the youth vote, including free college. You’re more likely to care about student loans if you’re still paying them off, or if you will have to pay them off soon, and this is true whether you are male or female or non-binary. There is also the fact—for which I can offer only generations of history and human experience as evidence—that young people are, by and large, far more likely to believe that big, sweeping changes can be effected very quickly than older ones. Big, immediate change is Sanders’ whole selling point—many of the changes are ones I long for myself—and though I find him terminally light on specifics, I acknowledge that the promise itself has power.

Hillary Clinton meets supporters after debating Sen. Bernie Sanders on February 4, 2016, in Durham, N.H. | AP Photo

The debate around Clinton’s “pragmatism” and Sanders’ “idealism” has the effect of making her sound like a dull paper-pusher and Sanders sound like Braveheart leading his barbarian troops into battle, two caricatures which elide their many similarities—as a matter of fact, they share the vast majority of their positions, including some of the positions leftists don’t like, and they voted together 93 percent of the time in the Senate—but the call to revolution is less powerful to those of us who have answered it before in vain. In my experience, you can tell a Clinton supporter from a Sanders supporter very quickly by (a) whether they voted in the 2000 election, and (b) the sheer weight of anger and/or despair with which they pronounce the words “Ralph Nader.” I like what Sanders believes, but I like what Clinton will do. And, yes, one of the things I believe she will do is to center women’s rights and feminism in her governing policy to a level that is flat-out unprecedented in American politics. She’s been doing that her whole life, and I would love to see her do it in the White House. But it’s my overall trust in her competence that’s guiding my decision, not some secret set of instructions mailed out to everyone of my age and gender.

Which is all to say that, though I may shake my head at the idea that a “revolution” is somehow going to translate into eight years of effective governance, I do so as a woman who remembers going to see Nader’s running mate Winona LaDuke speak at her college, and thrilling at the idea that I would be able to vote in our first female vice-president. (I, uh ... didn’t.) Though I may shake my fist at the ceiling in exasperation at the idea that we can vote in a woman “next time” (guys, she ran in 2008! This is “next time!”) I also remember that, after the brutal battle of that 2008 primary, I found great consolation in the idea that after I’d elected Obama, I would have another chance to elect Hillary Clinton. At the withered and senile age of 33, I can still see where my dewy and youthful 29-year-old colleagues are coming from, and even if I disagree with them, I know that it is in my best interests, and the world’s, to respect their perspectives and their votes. “Younger women” and “older women” are not fundamentally different creatures. Younger women and older women are the same woman, at different ages. And we have the same fundamental interest in fighting sexism wherever it occurs.

So here’s what’s sexist: This goddamned media-concocted catfight plotline. It frames old women as irrelevant, scolding, biddies; it frames young women as anti-feminist airheads; it forces both women into misogynist cartoons about female cattiness and stupidity, rather than engaging with them as complex human beings. And frames the crucial struggle as one between women, rather than between women and the overarching problems facing the nation. It’s a rotten frame for a good debate. No matter what our age and affiliation, we can resist it. And we should. When we stop fighting each other, we start changing the world.

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This means young women aren’t judging HRC on her gender—and that’s a good thing.

Elizabeth Drew is a journalist and author.

Hillary Clinton’s problem with millennials is the same one that she has with women in general—except for those over 65, the only category of voters she carried in New Hampshire. It’s the same problem she had with younger women eight years ago:

Women don’t like to be told that they should support Hillary because she’s a woman.

That’s an insult to their intelligence. Just like other voters, they want to decide whether to back her on the merits. They might judge her by her positions on the issues; they might judge her on her character and personality.

And if perchance the first woman president doesn’t do well in the job, which will be more challenging than usual unless the Democrats sweep congress in 2016, what will have been achieved?

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Clinton’s tone deaf messaging has millennials shaking their heads.

Peg Tyre is a journalist and author of The Trouble With Boys and The Good School.

To the shock and disbelief of the Old Guard feminists, the younger generation of women is simply looking at presidential contenders in a different way. Don’t they remember the stories we told them about what it used to be like? asked one attendee at a party on Manhattan’s Upper West Side last night celebrating, appropriately, a new art project/book about life after menopause. Is this a reaction against their mothers? questioned another. What are they thinking?

The answer is, quite a lot. And they want a candidate who is more consistent, more racially inclusive and shaped by the forces that have shaped their own lives—the economic upheavals of the post-Great Recession world. To the dismay of the “shoulder pad” feminists, millennial women are dismissing out of hand what was once a bedrock belief: that there’s a homogeneity to the female experience. We are not all, as Kipling once wrote, “sisters under the skin.” These millennial women, the best educated and most information savvy women in the history of the world, say unequivocally that the conditions that shape women’s lives—housing, criminal justice policy, educational opportunity, employment—cut one way if you’re rich, white and gliding through the corridors of power. And they cut another way altogether if you are not. The yawning divide between Hillary Clinton, a powerful women who wants to lead, and younger, less powerful female Americans whose support she took for granted, has never been more brutally apparent.

Women didn’t vote based on gender in the 1970s; they didn’t do it in the 80s; they didn’t do it in the 90s. Why do we all expect them to do it this year?

The question is, why is this a surprise? The split has been growing for a while. Yes, millennial women are ones that followed the media barrage and made tech billionaire Sheryl Sandberg a best-selling author. But just slightly under the radar, radical young feminists—and especially young feminists of color—were issuing their own withering critique. They called by name what has long been a sneaking suspicion among the growing number of female have-nots—that a certain cadre of wealthy woman would rather exaggerate their own oppression than actually act to improve the conditions of the poor, black, Latino and rural white women who are struggling to find the pathway to a better life for themselves and for their families. Just like the Old Guard knew in their bones in the 1970s that things could not continue as they were, the millennial women know in their bones the exact way the deck gets stacked against you, not just because you’re female, although that’s part of it, but because you were not born into the economic elite.

And still, in the echo-chamber of Clinton supporters, (How can they forget how much Hillary has done for women! It’s her time. She deserves it. ) there seems to be only a slowly dawning understanding of Sanders’ deep appeal. Witness Chelsea, a veritable poster-child for the gilded life (Stanford, Oxford, McKinsey, NBC job at a reported $600,000 salary, lucrative board appointments at the companies of her parent’s famous friends) and her tone deaf attack on Sanders before the Iowa caucus. Witness that famous feminist Bill Clinton talking about women’s rights in New Hampshire. And there was Hillary’s seemingly off-hand defense of lucrative speech to financial giants. “That’s what they offered!” she told Anderson Cooper when questioned about the $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. Then there was the cringe-inducing spectacle of Old Guard feminists chastise younger women for refusing to fall in line, not once but twice. Campaigns can be messy, people can misspeak and minor comments blow out of proportion, but even Clinton’s digital communication has been tone deaf when it comes to millennial women. “My daughters get emails from the Sanders campaign urging them to join the fight for income equality and immigrant rights and free college for all. The ones from Hillary say ‘let Hillary know you stand with her’ and ‘Wish Hillary a Happy Birthday,’” says Molly Gordy, a longtime feminist from Manhattan who is old enough to have young adult daughters. “So who would you vote for—someone leading a movement, or a someone who comes off like a narcissist feeding their disorder? It’s a PR disaster.”

And then there is Clinton’s “evolution” on issues, which, so readily available to any millennial woman with an iPad, can seem not like a maturing point of view but raw political expediency. “I can go on Google and listen to Sanders’ speeches from 1980s, how he as the mayor of Vermont signed into place the very first pride/LGBT parade in the country, I can Google pictures of him fighting to end racial segregation during his time at University of Chicago and the time he marched to Washington DC with MLK in the 1960s,” says Barnard student Karol Rogelle Francisco. “In the same way, I can find countless videos of Clinton on Youtube defending DOMA.” And while Bernie’s message may be repetitive, idealistic and details about his foreign policy uncomfortably thin, it’s hard to find evidence that self-dealing is one of his faults. “I can simply Google countries that have donated to the Clinton Foundation during her time as secretary of state,” says Francisco. It’s not about discounting the struggles women have faced in the past. Or anything Freudian. “I’m in my 20’s and I absolutely admire my mother,” says wedding planner Leah Mae Stewart. She says she wants a candidate who seems less compromised. For Stewart, it’s Bernie all the way.

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Women have never voted on gender alone.

Elizabeth Holtzman represented New York’s 16th congressional district from 1973 to 1981. She was also elected district attorney of Brooklyn and comptroller of New York City. She practices law in New York.

People are astonished that Hillary Clinton is losing the women’s vote to Bernie Sanders. It’s not at all astonishing to me. I’ve run for office many times, and learned that women in general don’t vote for other women purely based on gender. As a woman candidate, I would have loved for it to work that way, but that’s not how women engage in politics. They didn’t do it in the 1970s; they didn’t do it in the 80s; they didn’t do it in the 90s. Why do we all expect them to do it this year?

I think most women want to see a woman in the country’s top office. But that desire does not outweigh other factors in determining their vote. Why not? One reason may be that women are taught from a young age to put the interests of others—children, husbands and parents—before their own. This means personal gender identity can easily take a back seat to other issues seen as having a bigger effect on the lives of not just women but their families, such as the economy or national security.

I’d argue that millennial women today probably feel even less gender identity than their older peers. Many of them see equality, if not already attained, then certainly within reach. I disagree: Women still have a long way to go. But I’ll admit that women are much better off today than when I was growing up, when, for instance, the right to contraception, abortion, equal pay, equal credit were non-existent. I can see why a young woman might look at the world today and fail to see the urgency of having a woman in office. Older women, while not universally wild about Clinton, are more likely to support her than millennials. They not only know the candidate better, but they have also suffered longer from gender discrimination and know the burden of caring for their families without adequate day care, parental leave, sick leave or other similar programs. They may feel more keenly the difference that a woman president would make in their lives.

We also can’t deny the role that sexism, among both women and men, is playing here. Successful women in politics must show strength and effectiveness, but the more they do, the more they violate the unwritten rules of feminine decorum, and thereby engender hostility to themselves among both women and men.

Hillary has shown amazing grit in seeking the presidency. She has always known that her candidacy would challenge not just the Republican orthodoxy about the role of government in America, but the deeply ingrained views of women’s roles in our society. The bigger question her candidacy raises is whether both men and women in this country are ready to accept a woman who does that.

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They want to get excited, if …

Jill Abramson is a journalist and author.

I’ve interviewed a number of women in their 20s about their disconnect with Hillary Clinton and written about it. Mainly, these women are very serious about politics and favor drastic changes in the social order, which is why Sanders appeals to them. They also criticize Clinton's record on criminal justice and the Iraq war. Some see her as part of the establishment they so distrust.

Overall, there is a lack of excitement about her candidacy because she hasn’t yet connected, either on the issues or in her way of communicating. But some are hoping this will change. They want to get excited and want to see a woman become president, but only if she represents the change they want.

Hillary supporters pack up orders at the Ready for Hillary super PAC store in Arlington, Virginia, on April 3, 2015. | AP Photo

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Are we so sure Clinton doesn’t have millennial support? We’re relying on polls from two very unrepresentative states.

Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in Nairobi and New York City.

With seven out of 10 women under 45 voting for Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that something significant is going on, or Hillary has a problem we didn’t realize. But there’s another way to think about this: what we’re seeing could be a problem with polling.

It could be that the whole premise of millennials loving Bernie and disliking Hillary is a result of unreliable or non-existent polling. Millennials are the most diverse voting generation in American history, but the media narrative about their voting patterns is being set by two of the whitest states in the country. Because Iowa and New Hampshire were first, the polls are either about those states specifically, or heavily weighted toward them. Even the Reuters national poll, which lets users filter results according to voter identity, isn’t able to break down the black woman vote because the sample size is too small—when you try to see the preferences of registered African-American women, you get a message telling you there aren’t enough responses to get accurate results. That tells me we’re missing some crucial voices, especially going into states where African Americans are a major Democratic voting bloc.

It could be that the whole premise of millennials loving Bernie and disliking Hillary is a result of unreliable or non-existent polling.

According to the most recent PPP poll, Hillary Clinton is polling at 82 percent among African Americans nationally, while Bernie has just 8 percent support. Clinton also has a 12-point lead among Hispanics and she’s polling at 60 percent from women generally. We know that women turn out to vote more than men, and African-American women turn out in large numbers, especially for Democrats—nearly a quarter of Democratic votes come from African Americans. If pollsters aren’t including enough African-American women to be statistically significant, that should tell us there’s an issue with the polls, not with Clinton—and that if pollsters aren’t looking at voters of color proportionate to their influence on Democratic elections, they may be wrongly assessing the leanings of women of all ages.

Iowa and New Hampshire are two of the least representative states in the country, especially for Democrats who draw on a more diverse voting base than Republicans. To extrapolate from those two states how either Clinton or Sanders will do with young people nationwide is foolish. It is significant that Sanders did so well with millennials in the first two primaries, and anecdotally from young women I’ve spoken with, he does seem to be the cooler, more popular choice on college campuses. But I don’t think we know yet how Clinton is going to do among young people outside of very white states because pollsters haven’t asked. But I would pause before suggesting that millennials nationwide are more supportive of Bernie. The white ones are. But 44 percent of millennials are non-white, and we have not heard from them in any significant numbers yet.

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Bernie Sanders is a better feminist.

Mahroh Jahangiri is deputy director of Know Your IX, a student and survivor-led organization working to end gender violence in schools, and a columnist at Feministing.com

Many folks coming into this election assumed that between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the former would be the obvious feminist candidate. She’s pro-abortion, has a Planned Parenthood endorsement and, of course, is a woman. But to consider these qualities sufficiently feminist would be to remind us, again, how narrowly capital-w-for-white “Women’s issues” have always been defined.

Many women, especially those of color, have long understood feminism as a much broader commitment to anti-violence. We care about measures like war and Walmart and prisons in addition to access to abortion; we care about dismantling class- and race-based systems of oppression in addition to fighting the patriarchy. It is on these wider issues that Clinton—far from simply being “not progressive enough”—has gone out of her way, including by joining GOP ranks, to support violent policies against non-white women and their communities at home and abroad.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton greet guests after participating in the Democratic debate on February 11 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. | Getty

As first lady, she lobbied hard to gut U.S. welfare, by supporting her husband’s welfare reform bill. She also pushed for the 1994 crime bill, which expanded the mass incarceration of black communities as we see it today, calling for “more police in the street” and “many dollars” to build more prisons. Some claim it’s unfair to hold Clinton responsible for policies that were ultimately implemented by her husband. But she also helped to expand police and military violence during her tenure as a U.S. senator and as secretary of state. Clinton’s State Department devised the legal reasoning that justified the expansion of American drone attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians, and she pushed to maintain U.S. ties with dictators in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain. She has promised to invite the Donald Trump of Israel—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—to her White House, despite growing opposition even within the Obama administration to Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine. What’s more, Clinton passionately advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq—perhaps the worst crime of our generation and one that killed hundreds of thousands of people. If I had to come up with a tagline after hearing her defend the Patriot Act and a burgeoning surveillance state during the fourth Democratic debate, it would probably be: Don’t you worry, girls are as good as the guys at getting racist, imperialist crap done. Hardly a compelling message of women’s empowerment to smart young voters.

Bernie Sanders is far from perfect—after all, he voted for the 1994 crime bill. But recognizing that he, like Clinton, has shown imperfect vision is, as Michelle Alexander wrote this week, “not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic.” He opposed the Iraq War. He opposed the Patriot Act. And he opposed the Clintonite welfare reform that threw countless low-income families into extreme poverty. In doing so, he has shown a much deeper commitment to anti-violence, and that feels refreshingly more feminist. There are many of us who would love to support a woman’s presidential campaign. But for those who also want to prioritize the voices of fellow women, those Clinton has locked up—or blown up—in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and the United States, Clinton is simply not it.

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Gender is not an issue for most young women—and it shouldn’t be.

Sally Quinn is a journalist and author.

I don’t think this has a lot to do with Hillary. I think that most young women and a lot of older women feel that they are beyond the idea of having to vote for someone simply because that person is a woman. I just don’t think gender is an issue for most of them and I don’t think it should be. Obviously Bernie Sanders has a message that is more appealing to them. I’m not sure what Hillary can do to appeal more to women. Her views are so well known that any changes in her position or her style wouldn’t work. She is who she is.

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We never knew the Hillary of the ’90s—when she was a boss.

Gillian Brassil works in video production in Santa Fe. She has previously written for GQ and the New York Times Magazine.

Endless theories have been put forward to explain the disconnect between women of my generation and Hillary Clinton: Flighty youths don’t feel strong party ties or any love for the Democratic establishment. They find Clinton too rehearsed, her promises hollow. A generation that came of age in a wrecked economy, awash in student loan debt, wants a revolutionary voice, an outsider, a heaping helping of socialism. I think those explanations are more or less right. But it’s also been suggested that millennials would feel differently about Hillary if we’d been politically conscious during the ‘90s, when she and Bill Clinton came to national prominence.

I set out to discover whether there was some truth to that. How much did I and my friends actually know about her early career? Was it an essential part of the passion that had 60-year-old women going to the mat for her? Maybe I’d grown disenchanted with Clinton not just because I’d grown up, but because she’d legitimately represented more that I cared about during her tenure as first lady.

Our first meaningful exposure to Hillary Clinton wasn’t the version our parents knew, the ‘90s boss. It was the opponent of someone we were falling in love with.

Last April, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes presented a tongue-in-cheek series, “Hillary for Millenials,” that addresses this possibility. In his introduction, he states, “There’s probably no other figure in public life who’s more battle-tested or has been through as many fake scandals as the former first lady. Now, she’s running for president in a country where tens of millions of people were toddlers or in grade school when she was living in the White House.” The videos are supposed to explain some of the controversies she’s weathered over her long career, but my main takeaway was: Man, Hillary used to be such a boss. I knew that she’d helmed Bill’s healthcare reform taskforce, but had always assumed it was a figurehead position, not that she’d been a real player (despite heavy criticism that she was overstepping her wifely role). Her defiance of skeptics was endearing, but even more than that, I found that era’s Hillary Clinton so much more likeable. The skit she and Bill made mocking their plan’s detractors was funny but not forced, which is seemingly impossible for her now. Her faint southern accent didn’t sound put-on (though it probably was). Her style was on point. And even when apologizing, she seemed so much less eager to please. I could never imagine ‘90s Hillary trying to compare herself to your abuela.

When I asked some friends what they knew about First Lady Hillary Clinton, they seemed surprised when I described what I’d been reading and watching. For all of us, the most immediate association we had with that period was how she’d dealt with Bill’s infidelity. “She’s still ‘the woman whose husband got a blowjob in the Oval Office,’” one friend commented.

No one I talked to doubted for a second that Hillary was incredibly accomplished and experienced as a candidate. We’d even recognized that in 2008—and it did feel crazy that it wasn’t enough—but we’d cast our first votes for Barack Obama. Somehow, even after watching his causes compromised and his ambition stymied, we’re still looking for a candidate who is equally inspiring, who wasn’t yet sullied by a life in politics. (That candidate, to be clear, is not Bernie Sanders, but at least he’s a little less indebted to the establishment.) Our first meaningful exposure to Hillary Clinton wasn’t the version our parents knew, the ‘90s boss. It was the opponent of someone we were falling in love with.

(This response has been condensed from a full article. To read more about Gillian’s 8th-grade recitation of a Hillary Clinton speech, click here.)

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Young people get the doom and gloom. They don’t want their candidate to tell them more about it.

Latoya Peterson is deputy editor, digital innovation for ESPN’s The Undefeated

Last summer, I called a Lyft while attending TechFestNW. On the ride back from the venue to the hotel, I chatted with the driver, a young woman who drove for the car service when she wasn’t working shifts as a chef. Somehow, the conversation shifted to politics. When we stopped at a red light, she asked me, almost tentatively, “Have you ever heard of Bernie Sanders?”

It was the first time I’d had a random person try to discuss the merits of Sanders’ platform with me, and it wouldn’t be the last. And far from the popular idea of the “Bernie Bro,” every last person who has tried to passionately persuade me to #FeeltheBern has been a young woman.

No one tries to talk to me about Hillary Clinton. This is most likely because, by this point, Clinton’s been in the spotlight for so long, it’s impossible not to have an opinion on her candidacy. HRC has been a political player since 1991. I was in elementary school when she became first lady.

Unfortunately for Clinton, it’s almost as if young women know her way too well. There’s no mystery. There’s not much to wonder about how she will react in any given situation. We know. We know she’s a hawk. We know she loves Wall Street. (So does Eric Holder, but he isn’t running for president.) We know she’s reckless with email. We know that she’s a pro-choice champion. This makes Clinton is an easy target—she’s got a 25-year-long resume to sift through for attack ad fodder.

Complicating things further is Clinton’s insistence on running a pragmatic, no nonsense campaign. She isn’t selling a dream in her presidency. She isn’t sailing in like Obama, with his talk of a more perfect union. She is peddling cold, hard reality. In her “Real Progress Now” ad, Clinton’s voice boldly proclaims, “The American people can’t afford to wait for ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world.” During her debate with Sanders, she pressed hard on where his funding would come from for his lofty goals. Anyone paying attention to our increasingly divided Congress will realize that she is right on this count: Rethinking any piece of our current system is going to be a long, hard battle.

Facing the harsh realities of the current political gridlock in Washington and the complicated geopolitical climate requires clear thinking and an action plan.

But Clinton missteps by grounding her strategy in gloom and doom. Young voters are well aware of the grim reality of day-to-day life—student loan debt, a shaky global economy, terrorism and war. The world is all too real. Voters on both sides of the aisle are spurning the establishment candidates for a reason—people are tired of politics as usual. Incremental change and compromise is a part of our governmental system and with good reason. But voters are hungry for candidates that are willing to go outside the boundaries, the mavericks that just might be able to snap our stagnant political system back to a democracy we can believe in—not just work within it. Time and time again, candidates for president promise the moon and stars, only to face a harsh reality once governance begins. Time and time again, voters—especially young ones—cast their ballots for those candidates hoping that this time, we will finally make progress in this country. If young voters are drifting to the margins, it’s because of this disappointing dynamic.

Of course, gender is a factor in how Clinton is received: That’s one of the reasons she may not be getting the support a straight-talking male candidate may have received. But it is not the only issue. For all the talk of Hilary’s gender gap in the polls, it’s the inspiration gap that is her largest challenge. Already, progressives online are talking about “holding their noses” and picking “the lesser evil.” Is it so wrong to want to vote for a candidate, rather than against the other party?

After the devastating loss in New Hampshire, Clinton acknowledged she had some work to do with youth. Young voters are looking for a leader with answers, a leader that works for change, and a leader that inspires them to march to the ballot box on Election Day. If Clinton wants to be that person, she needs to start by taking a long look at her message.

