For over three-quarters of Duquesne’s undergrad students, the 2024 Presidential Election will be the first one in which they are eligible to vote.
It is reasonable to assume that the majority of them will be voting for the Democratic party all the way down the ticket. Young people voting overwhelmingly blue isn’t a surprise.
What is surprising is the pride with which they will do so. For the first time in what feels like more than a decade, the Democratic party finally has some foresight and backbone, which is giving long-awaited hope to its voters.
Thirty-nine days ago, the act of voting for the Democratic ticket was one that would have been done out of obligation and fear of the other outcome. “Anyone but Trump,” they’d say before voting for Joe Biden, who would have been 85 at the end of his second term. But by some miracle the deck was re-shuffled, and young 59-year-old Kamala Harris became the candidate after a dismal debate performance by Biden put pressure on him to drop out of the race.
With a relatively youthful, charismatic and positive leader, the Democrats seem to have gotten their groove back.
Since Barack Obama left office in 2016, the left in America has been led by focus grouped yesmen, who failed to showcase the same level of charisma that the 44th president had. The problem with that? They were there for a reason. All were inferior candidates to Obama in the 2008, and still are. It took until this year for the head-scratchingly reactive and placid Democratic Party to finally usher in a new generation.
After Obama left office with one of the highest approval ratings in the last century, Democrats grew complacent with the values that brought them there, and they were not willing to meet the desires of young progressives, but that has changed.
Is Kamala the best candidate ever? Arguably, no. But she represents a new generation of politics that took Democrats 15 years to usher in. That level of excitement around a candidate and their politics really matters. That much could be seen at last week’s convention.
Would Lil’ Jon have shown up to excite the crowd if Joe Biden were still at the head of the ticket? Probably not. That performance, and many other moments in Chicago showed that there is a new generation of Democratic politicians finally catching up to the base of their supporters.
Even little things that the establishment wing of the Democratic Party wouldn’t have put up with seem possible on the national stage. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who previously would have been discounted for having ‘overly-progressive’ policies, have been embraced enthusiastically and given time to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Whether that’s just PR spin or political dead-cat bounce, the moves made by Democratic leadership this summer have played better for them than whatever their strategy was at the beginning of election season.