No Joke: This Is An Existential Election, Millennials (UPDATED)

The once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle has devoted valuable time and space to the topic of, "For Millennial Voters, the Clinton vs. Trump choice 'feels like a joke'" and... oh fergawdsakes:

The presidential campaign is drawing global interest, but young people from Virginia to Silicon Valley — students and teachers, shopkeepers and baristas, engineers and lawn mowers — feel isolated from it. Their Facebook feeds are cluttered with political headlines and outrage. They see snippets of Clinton and Trump on Snapchat. Some of them follow daily developments on news websites. But they don’t hear anything from Clinton or Trump that sounds like solutions for their own challenges.  (our emphasis)

Look, we love Millennials (our children are Millennials), and we recognize this article was intended to feed the non- stop corporate media narratives that 1) folks are angry! and isolated! and disconnected! and 2) the choices are equally bad!  At the risk of sounding like angry old guys, finding uninformed folks like the ones interviewed in the article couldn't have been all that difficult because there are folks like them in every demographic, in every part of the country.  We could toss a rock outside our houses and hit a few in their empty heads.  (OK, we sound like angry old guys.)  But, this isn't your "normal" election, where a lazy reliance on popular culture memes (and there are loads of them quoted in the article) is an acceptable way of making a choice, or not making one.

Just taking that one paragraph above, if these Millennials are just relying on Facebook or Snapchat to inform their decisions, they're not trying very hard to help themselves out here. They're not really being responsible citizens if they have time to share their lack of knowledge with a reporter but not enough to, say, look at the Democratic platform or the site that has all they need to know about Hillary Clinton's "solutions."  It's really not that hard, and it doesn't take that long.

Millennials have the lowest voter turnout rate of any demographic.  Low voter turnout is a chronic characteristic of "young voters" (they just don't turn out in the same rates as older voters -- never have, including when we were that age).  Maybe some of those interviewed will figure things out and vote for (as Michael Bloomberg said) the "sane" candidate, some may vote for the dangerous, neo- fascist sh*tgibbon, and some will be just too lazy to get around to doing anything. History, though, moves on with or without them.

UPDATE:  We're happy to report that, contrary to what you might glean from the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle hit piece article, Millennials are solidly behind Clinton.  Now, please vote!

A Very Bad Poll For Hillary Clinton

The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll has a bad number for Hillary Clinton vs. orange codpiece Donald "Rump" Trump (our emphasis):

... [I]n a head-to-head general election matchup, Clinton leads Trump 51 percent to 39 percent among registered voters nationwide, the poll found.

"Bad," you say?  Twelve points!? With that kind of a lead, she has it in the bag!  With new energy and new Millennial voters coming into the Democratic Party, not to mention Rump's toxicity, this will be a cakewalk!  People can relax, stay home or purity vote for Jill Stein even!

Let's see if there are any recent examples of how this thinking might go disastrously wrong...

When you look at the [Brexit] numbers, it’s quite fascinating. The youngest voters wanted to stay in wide margins, and the oldest voters wanted to leave. 

And that’s the exact opposite of who turned out to vote. Older voters turned out, younger voters did not. So it didn’t matter if the overwhelming majority of millennials preferred to remain in the EU, they simply didn’t vote to express that opinion.  [snip]

... You might think your vote doesn’t matter — and that is what’s going on if you’re voting for a third party, in your heart of hearts you “know” that your vote won’t really get Trump elected. Well, you might want to talk to some British millennials right about now.

That, unfortunately, fits a pattern in this country of the most progressive cohort (today, the Millennials) simply not bothering to show up to vote.  If this historic trend continues in the 2016 election, it could spell disaster for us.  (We're not picking on Millennials here;  the youngest voting generation has always shown a reluctance to get into the voting booth.)  Here's a chart that's been on the Internetz that illustrates what not exercising your voting franchise means, again in terms of the Brexit voters:



No matter what the polls tell us, no matter the margins between now and election day, no matter who else is on the ballot, every American who values liberal democracy, equality, tolerance, and human decency has to get themselves to the polls and vote for Clinton and every other Democrat on the ballot.  Just a reminder what happens when you "assume:"

Your WTF of the day: only 30% of Leave voters thought the UK would actually Leave. The others thought they could get away with a protest.

— Mark Chadbourn (@Chadbourn) June 24, 2016

(h/t americablog)