Trump won the election for a lot of reasons, but one of the most troublesome is that Democrats, particularly young Democrats, simply didn’t show up for Hillary Clinton in the same numbers as for Barack Obama.

Americans have never loved and still don’t love President-elect Donald Trump. He got even fewer votes than Clinton. That Clinton was still ultimately more popular than Trump, the thing she bet her entire campaign on, was true; it just wasn’t enough.

In an election that was supposed to see increased voter turnout, fewer Democrats supported Clinton than did Obama in either 2008 or 2012. And this despite a larger overall population. (Trump also saw a dip in support relative to past Republican nominee Mitt Romney, but it wasn’t as marked.)

It shouldn’t have been so surprising Clinton lost – it’s extraordinary, after one party has controlled the presidency for two consecutive terms, for any candidate of that same party to do anything other than lose. Having said that, it’s easy to imagine that had Obama been allowed to run for a third term, he would’ve won again.

In other words, it’s not a sickness with the party’s values, it’s a sickness specific to Clinton. She desperately needed young people and women, and has done plenty of work on policies that would benefit those groups, like parental leave and climate. But ultimately, they didn’t buy it.

Clinton significantly underperformed among under-40s, while Trump held steady relative to past Republican nominees. That young people weren’t defecting to her opponent but simply staying home suggests a lot of Sanders supporters couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her without their candidate on the ballot.

Many young progressives have chafed at the notion that they should support Clinton “just because” she’s a woman. Others were sufficiently put off by her ties to Wall Street or her interventionist foreign policy. She was cast as too centrist, merely the lesser of two evils, and the label stuck. It also wasn’t true.

Voting for her was bigger than that. Whatever your opinions about Clinton, the most progressive Democratic platform in history was on the ballot with her; any Bernie Sanders supporter worth their salt should’ve been able to see that. If they cared about progressive policy they would have bothered to show up.

This election will leave the party with many newly perceived facts to study, but one seems to be that many young voters and young Sanders supporters, in particular, weren’t actually voting for him because of where he stands on the issues: if they were, the platform would have mattered. They wanted him for reasons the Americans always choose their political candidates: for his aura – a star-power defined in terms of a masculinity that’s become synonymous with political charisma.

Clinton wasn’t a perfect candidate – and it’s true she’s not as ideologically liberal as Sanders or some other folks young Democrats might have liked to have seen get the nomination. But she does have more progressive policy outlined than Sanders or just about anyone else, in part because she has so much more policy articulated, period.



Unfortunately, in the current political climate, ability to do the job of government well is not a plus, but a minus. That she could have accomplished work in Washington and maybe even worked across the aisle, sewing up the liberal legacy of Obama, didn’t help her – it hurt her.

There’s reason to be angry at the way she was selected to be the Democratic nominee, the way she was insulated from healthy primary opposition, the way it was perceived to be her “turn”. She was in many ways exactly the wrong fit for the spirit of rebellion in America right now.



But that only underscores that the forces at work this election had less to do with pushing the Democrats to the left than with the burn-everything mentality that’s found footholds in Britain and other parts of the world. They had to do with gender-based double standards, and the fact that, even at this late date, too many people who call themselves liberals still can’t bring themselves to vote for a woman.