ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) – They’ve watched their parents and friends struggle to pay medical bills. They’ve spent time in Spain, Australia and other countries where people don’t have the same worry. They live at home instead of the college dorm to try to cut down on what they’ll owe in loans. They question whether to have kids in an environment where the effects of climate change are getting worse by the day.
The young Bernie Sanders supporters who gathered for a Super Tuesday watch party in Michigan came with reasons both personal and ideological for wanting him to be president. But they were all asking the same question: Why can’t things be different?
“Young people are aspirational,” said Jaclyn Schess, 24, a health economics researcher at the University of Michigan. She sat on a folding chair inside the Sanders campaign’s Ann Arbor office watching returns projected on a screen from the online news network The Young Turks. “We can look at what’s happening now without being weighed down by the failures of the past and say ‘Our country deserves better. … We can do it.'”
As Sanders tries to top former Vice President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist’s most enduring support has come from voters under age 30 like Schess. They are moved by Sanders’ vision for the country – of a place where everyone has health care, college is free and rich people and corporations don’t have more political influence than teachers and students – and his consistency on the issues.
They don’t believe his ideas are unrealistic or unaffordable. To them, the main argument that President Donald Trump and others have used against Sanders – that he’s a “socialist” who wants to give everything away for free – isn’t at all scary and may be a point in Sanders’ favor.