Now that Hillary Clinton has dispatched Bernie Sanders, she’s making a big play for one of his core fan bases: young voters.

The first high-profile Sanders staffer, specializing in college student outreach, decamped earlier this month from Burlington to Brooklyn, joining other battleground state aides who had worked for the Vermont senator and are now in Clinton’s camp. Advisers to both candidates say more Sanders staffers will be hired soon.


Meanwhile, Clinton’s allies in the environmental, labor and women’s health communities are tapping into the same data, digital and other messaging tactics that Sanders used to such great effect in galvanizing millions of millennial supporters.

And talks are ongoing between both campaigns about how to deploy Sanders later this summer and fall as a Clinton surrogate. The Clinton camp wants him to make his largest splash with the young cohort captivated by his Brooklyn-tinged talk of “revolution.”

“They’re discussing all these things now, and once they figure it out, that’s what he’ll be doing,” Sanders’ senior adviser Tad Devine told POLITICO.

For Clinton, moving ahead of the Democratic National Convention to start targeting young voters is a vital play to unify a part of the party base that came out in record numbers to propel Barack Obama into the White House in 2008 and then assisted with his reelection four years later.

Millennials, roughly defined as someone born between the early 1980s and the closing days of the Bill Clinton presidency in 2000, are now larger in size (75.4 million, according to a Pew Research Center report from April) than the Baby Boomers (74.9 million). But they have an unproven track record when it comes to actually voting.

But Clinton won’t be alone in appealing to millennials. They represent a unique pickup opportunity for the biggest wild card of 2016, the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Trump is anything but a traditional candidate, and on issues like gay marriage, student debt and Planned Parenthood he’s said enough to muddy the partisan battle lines and come across as at least a more moderate option than many of his peers in the GOP. Of course, for all of those remarks, Trump’s rants about everyone from Mexicans to Muslims and the disabled also stand out as big turnoffs for millennials.

“People want candidates who are kind to people of all walks of life. That’s not really what Donald Trump exudes,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a GOP pollster and author who has written about her party’s need to appeal to millennial voters, said last week during an event co-hosted by Ad Age Magazine and Time Inc.

Trump’s celebrity status prior to his presidential campaign makes him a unique cultural phenomenon for younger people who have grown up knowing him more as host of his own reality TV show. It’s one of the reasons why a Saturday Night Live parody viral video with Trump “dad dancing” to a song by the rapper Drake has garnered more than 7 million views on YouTube. Trump’s obsessive social media presence and the sheer size of his follower base means he will be a frequent presence for young voters via their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat apps, even for the people who don’t necessary want to see posts about him.

“Where he has a distinct advantage, he’ll find untraditional ways to get into their stream of life that could impact and help him at least resonate,” Zac Moffatt, who worked in 2012 as digital director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said in an interview.

Supporters cheer as Bernie Sanders arrives at a campaign rally at Penn State University, Tuesday, April 19. | AP Photo

Trump has the Clinton campaign and its allies especially nervous because he polls well with younger men and has even come within striking distance among 18-to-29 year olds in some recent polls, including an ABC News/Washington Post survey that showed a 17-point swing toward the Republican between March and May and a Public Policy Polling survey released last week in the battleground of Virginia where Clinton’s lead shrinks to 36 percent to 28 percent when voters have the option of voting for the Libertarian and Green Party candidates.

But while those data points are disconcerting for Democrats, they also aren’t seen as insurmountable either. There are other public polls showing Clinton crushing Trump in head-to-head contests, including a Harvard Institute of Politics survey from earlier this spring where she led by 36 points and a Bloomberg Politics national survey out last week where she was ahead 3 to 1 among likely voters between 18- and 29-years old.

While Sanders may have netted an estimated 1.2 million more votes than Clinton among 18- to 29-year olds during the 2016 primary and caucus contests, the general election will draw in millions more young people who didn’t bother to participate in their primaries and caucuses, let alone register to vote. That means their choices will essentially boil down to a pick among Clinton, Trump or a third party candidate. Or they could decide not to turn out at all.

“You’re not going to spend your time on millennials who are not going to come out to vote at least in the ground game going into November in the same way a brand wouldn’t spend all of its time and resources going after someone who is only going to maybe try their product one out of five times,” said Beth Lester Sidhu, the chief operating officer at the Stagwell Group, an investment firm founded by former Clinton 2008 campaign chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn.

Clinton campaign aides said in interviews that they were well aware of the challenges they face just in getting young people engaged with their campaign. After all, their attempts during the primaries to connect with younger people were frequently met with online mockery, including a request for feedback about student loan debt via emoji and a quick Snapchat video of Clinton rapping next to a river in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that has since gone viral with more than 29 million views.

But even as Clinton’s hipness comes under question, her aides say she’ll embrace her age – 68, which is actually two years younger than Trump -- and inner policy wonk. “She doesn’t need to be cool. She just needs to be who she is,” said Sarah Audelo, the Clinton campaign’s youth vote director. “That’s what young people are interested in. Young people want authenticity.”

The Clinton youth vote gameplan includes targeting different subgroups of the millennial generation on their own turf. High school students who will be 18 by Election Day can expect to get their own special pitch. Different messages will be directed at college students, young professionals just getting started in their careers and older millennials who have started families. Clinton’s youth-vote staffers are planning to take a listening tour of college campuses and other places where millennials work and congregate.

In Brooklyn, youth vote outreach is managed by Addisu Demissie, the longtime Democratic campaign consultant now working as Clinton’s national voter outreach and mobilization director. His chief lieutenants are Audelo, a former political director at the nonprofit Rock the Vote; Anne Hubert, a former Viacom senior vice president leading the millennial outreach effort; and Kunoor Ojha, the first major hire from Sanders’ campaign now running the national campus and student organizing program for Clinton in Brooklyn. Other staffers from the Vermont senator’s campaign are likely to be added in the weeks to come.

“I’m sure there will be more,” said Ken Strasma, a longtime Democratic data and micro-targeting expert who worked for Obama in 2008 and has spearheaded the Sanders effort in 2016.

Clinton also has air cover targeting the youth vote coming from several super PACs working on her behalf or taking aim at Trump. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s well-funded super PAC, NextGen Climate Action, hired a dozen former Sanders staffers to work on a $25 million anti-Trump campaign. The San Francisco-based group is planning voter registration efforts on some 200 college campuses in six presidential battleground states – Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania – as well as in Illinois, where there is a heated Senate race. The group also plans to target older millennials with a digital-first ad blast in several presidential swing states.

Strasma’s firm, HaystaqDNA, has been in talks with the For Our Future super PAC, a group also backed by Steyer, and four labor organizations that are focusing on turning out traditional Democratic voters for Clinton in key battleground states. The pro-choice group Emily’s List has a $20 million campaign targeting young women voters involving SS+K, a New York ad firm that did similar work for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

In a speech last week, Sanders said he had been surprised during the primaries by the size of his support among young voters, which he noted he won by “huge numbers” in many states.

While still not officially endorsing Clinton or suspending his campaign, he did promise to work with the presumptive nominee to beat Trump in the general election. Several of his advisers have also started to elaborate on that game plan.

Bernie Sanders supporters cheer as at a campaign rally on Sunday, April 17, 2016, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. | AP Photo

Devine, a longtime Democratic consultant who before working for Sanders had been a top presidential campaign aide to Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, said young people “will engage and will turn out in this election particularly if they feel that there is an agenda being presented that will make a real difference in their lives.”

The data and targeting tools that Sanders used to great effect in the Democratic primaries, Devine added, will also be available to Clinton.

“We know who they are. We’ve identified them. They’re part of the process,” Devine said. “And the modern tools of campaigning, once you’ve identified somebody, give you the ability to contact them, to persuade them and to mobilize them like you’ve never seen before.”

On the stump, Clinton is expected to get a big boost from several high profile celebrities with appeal to millennials, including pop singer Katy Perry and actress Lena Dunham.

Obama also is likely to return to many of the college campuses he once packed back in 2008. But it’s Sanders who many of his campaign aides expect will be a main draw.

Said Strasma, “He’ll be one of the strongest surrogates for Clinton among young people.”

