It's obvious that Joe Biden's 2024 re-election bid is encountering significant problems. Democrats know they can't run on his record, so they're basically relying on anti-Trumpism to get Biden across the finish line. It's not working. Biden is bleeding support from once-reliable Democrat constituencies, like nonwhite voters, who can still easily remember that things were a lot better for them under Trump.
And then there are young voters. They're not exactly pleased with Biden for the same reasons, but these indoctrinated youth are also not happy with his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Things have gotten bad enough with young voters that liberal college towns are no longer the Democrat strongholds they once were. The New York Times addressed this phenomenon on Monday.
"If you want to be the president, you should probably win Wisconsin," the report by Jess Bidgood begins. "And if you are a Democrat, there is a proven way to do that: Run up the numbers in Dane County, the fast-growing and deeply progressive swath of the state that contains Madison and the behemoth public university that carries the state’s name."
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Biden visited a technical college in Madison on Monday, during which he unveiled a new initiative aimed at bribing student loan borrowers with more cancellations of their debt. It was plain that this was a strategic move to generate enthusiasm for his re-election campaign among a cohort that he can't afford to lose in a battleground state he must win to have a path to victory in November. State senator Kelda Roys, a Democrat representing Madison, believes her district could potentially determine the outcome of the election.
"But this year, amid signs of an enthusiasm gap among young voters and widespread anger on college campuses over the administration’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza, college towns are emerging as a more complex battleground for Democrats," Bidgood wrote. "So I decided to head to Madison myself."
“I’m definitely a little bit nervous,” said Megan Eisenstein, the communications director of the College Democrats group at Lawrence University, who had traveled from her campus in Appleton, Wis., to Madison over the weekend for the statewide College Democrats convention.
“I think right now,” she added, “the hardest thing is to make young people excited about Joe Biden.”
Last week, when Wisconsin voters went to the polls in snow and rain for the now-very-much-effectively-over presidential primaries, nearly 50,000 people cast “uninstructed” votes on the Democratic side — meaning 8.3 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters seemingly decided to use their ballots to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
That wasn’t enough to net the “uninstructed” voters any delegates to this summer’s Democratic National Convention, as “uncommitted” voters did in Michigan, where the protest movement was born.
But it was enough to send a signal about voters’ discontent with Biden — particularly in a state that he won by just 20,682 votes in 2020.
According to an analysis conducted by The Daily Cardinal, the independent student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, nearly one-third of Democratic primary voters in precincts located on or around the university campus cast their votes as "uninstructed."
“This is more than just nit-picking, like, ‘I’d prefer if it was the other way,’” said Dahlia Saba, a student organizer with Listen to Wisconsin, the group that led the push for the “uninstructed” vote. “This is deep betrayal, and deep anger.”
State Representative Francesca Hong, a Democrat who endorsed the campaign for the “uninstructed” vote, said there is a risk that Biden could underperform here in November.
“I think there are people who say now that they will never vote for this president,” Hong said, although she believes there is still time for Biden to mobilize those voters if his administration shifts its policy regarding the war.
John Della Volpe, a polling expert at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, says that the issue of Gaza is a major one for young voters. “This generation seems to be voicing concern over Gaza, and also voicing concern about why all of this matters, why voting [matters]," he said. “That’s the biggest concern.”
Recent polls suggest a decline in young voter turnout compared to previous elections, with many expressing a lack of hope or excitement about the upcoming election. Despite efforts by the Biden campaign to engage young voters through a national organizing program and partnerships with youth voting groups, there remains a noticeable lack of enthusiasm among college students, as observed on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And it's most certainly not going to be limited to that one campus.
