is treated as news — has turned its eyes to Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand
Paul, the man who will singlehandedly bring his party into the 21
.
The narrative, pushed by Paul’s office and accepted by bored,
middle-aged members of the press, is that the 51-year-old libertarian is
just what Republicans needs to win over millennial voters and reclaim
the White House in 2016.
To be blunt: This is a stupid narrative and everyone who isn’t being paid by the Republican Party to promote it needs to stop.
Before
getting into why the idea of Millennial Man Rand Paul is nonsense, it’s
worth unpacking the argument. To be fair, it’s a bit more sophisticated
than what I’ve described above. As Joe Gandelman put it in a
for the Week, the curly-haired lover of liberty “has appeal to
millennials disillusioned by intrusive government surveillance and
aggressive drone strikes,” and that means he “could really boost his
numbers in GOP contests if he’s able to mobilize young voters…” This
could “snowball,” Gandelman writes, so long as Paul can convince the
kids that he’s “
a candidate of change,” a proposition
made all the more likely by the fact that “Paul would be the first GOP
nominee whose ideology is genuinely anchored in libertarianism, with
positions that often can’t be neatly categorized.”
Putting
those last two assertions aside — I’d say Barry Goldwater’s ideology
was quite clearly “anchored in libertarianism” and that libertarian
positions can, in fact, be “neatly categorized” as, well, libertarian —
Gandelman’s argument boils down to the following: Young people don’t
like the NSA and drones, so they might vote for Paul, who is also a
skeptic of the post-9/11 national security paradigm. Yet while he’s
right that millennial voters are far less comfortable with spying and
drone strikes than the rest of the electorate, Gandelman exaggerates the
intensity of their disaffection.
On spying, for example, it’s true that young voters are more concerned with civil liberties; but as a 2013
Washington Post poll found,
18- to 39-year-old Americans still think investigating terrorist
threats is more important the preserving civil liberties, by a breakdown
of 52 to 45 percent. On drone strikes, meanwhile, a 2013
Fox News poll
finds the conventional wisdom to be even more out of touch: by a score
of 65 to 32 percent, respondents under the age of 35 said they approve
of the U.S. using drones to kill suspected terrorists on foreign soil.
In fact, the only scenario for which a majority of the under-35 crowd
disapproves of drone strikes is if the suspect is an American citizen
and the strike takes place on U.S. soil. Even then, it’s hardly a
blowout, with 44 percent registering their approval.
So Gandelman’s pretty wrong, any way you slice it. But
a better argument
for Paul’s appealing to young voters is possible, and was indeed
offered by Ross Kaminsky in the American Spectator. Instead of leaning
so heavily on the assumption that kids these days hate Big Brother,
Kaminsky notes that on issues where millennial voters really stick out
from the rest — marriage equality and immigration reform — Paul has
tried to “thread the needle” by adopting positions that are slightly
more nuanced than the GOP norm. Paul’s against same-sex marriage, yes,
but he thinks it’s an issue best “left to the states” and has argued
that a reform of the tax code, “so it doesn’t mention marriage,” would
save the country from having to “redefine what marriage is…” On
immigration reform, too, Paul ultimately votes with the rest of his
party, but does so while leaving some wiggle room for expanding the work
visa program and legal immigration in general.
Better is a
relative term, however. While it’s true that Paul doesn’t usually sound
like an unreconstructed homophobe on the issue of gay marriage, it’s
also true that Paul has
jokingly compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and bestiality, putting himself in the same company as that noted champion of individual rights,
Rick Santorum.
Moreover, while nuance is nice, the fact remains that Paul is,
objectively, against marriage equality. Why would a millennial voter who
cares about LGBTQ issues support the guy who opposes marriage equality,
and compared same-sex partnerships to bestiality, over a candidate who
doesn’t do either of those things? Because nuance? Further, why would a
millennial voter who wants to see immigration reform happen in this
country support a candidate who doesn’t? Because he’s willing to accept
immigrants as a source of labor, even if he doesn’t think they deserve a
path to citizenship? Because, again, nuance?
Granted, Kaminsky
and his fellow travelers would probably say that while Paul won’t win
millennials over on these issues, his “balanced” approach might be
enough to keep them from dismissing him before listening any further.
There’s probably something to that. But there’s still a problem: It’s
not like millennials are exactly in sync with Paul’s views on economic
issues, either. Kaminsky’s implication that younger voters would thrill
to Paul’s doctrinaire laissez faire approach to the economy, if they
could only look past social issues, just doesn’t withstand even a little
bit of scrutiny.
It’s true that millennial voters are not nearly
as enthusiastic about the positive role government can play in promoting
social and economic equality as they were in the early days of the
Obama era. Back then, according to
a 2009 report
from the Dem-aligned Center for American Progress, as much as
two-thirds of young voters said that government should provide more
services, while three-fourths said there were more things the government
could and should be doing. A half-decade of Democratic incompetence and
Tea Party obstruction has definitely taken its toll.
Nevertheless, a
Pew Research Center report
put out earlier this month found that the majority of millennials still
want to see their government do more, not less, to even the playing
field. Asked to choose between smaller government with fewer services
and bigger government with more services, 53 percent of millennials
chose the latter while only 38 percent picked the former. And even
though 54 percent of them oppose Obamacare, only 44 percent agree with
Paul that it’s not the government’s job to ensure health insurance
coverage for all. Perhaps the most telling finding of the whole report
in this regard concerns Social Security, that longtime bugaboo of Paul
and libertarians like him. Despite the fact that a whopping 51 percent
of millennials believe they’ll receive
no Social Security
benefits by the time they’re eligible, and despite the fact that 53
percent of millennials think government should focus spending on helping
the young rather than the old, a remarkable 61 percent of young voters
oppose cutting Social Security benefits in any way, full stop.
Persuasive
as they can be, though, polls can’t tell us everything. As mentioned
earlier, History happens, and people’s views can change. Demography may
be a more reliable metric, then (even if too many Democrats have
succumbed to the fallacious “
demography is destiny”
belief that a more racially diverse rising electorate will guarantee
Dems a permanent majority). Paul certainly appears to be thinking about
the country’s demographic changes; he seemingly can’t go 10 minutes into
an interview or public statement without noting that his party must be
more “inclusive” and “welcoming” to what Republicans like to call, in a
triumph of euphemism, “non-traditional” voting blocs.
But as his much-discussed
speech last year at Howard University — and his
recent decision to chide Obama
for failing to remember how Martin Luther King was spied upon — can
attest, Paul’s version of outreach is not without its blemishes. He
deserves some amount of credit for recognizing that non-white voters
matter, too, I guess. But as is the case with immigration and same-sex
marriage, Paul’s attempts at nuance are more than outweighed by his
concrete policy stances. Simply put, I doubt that a young voter of color
is going to look sympathetically at the image of a white, Southern
conservative whitesplaining Martin Luther King to the first African
American president — especially if that voter happens to know that
Paul supports
modern versions of the voter suppression tactics King and other civil
rights heroes risked their lives to end. And what do you think the
chances are that a Democratic presidential candidate would bring up
Paul’s
infamous attack on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during a national campaign? I’d say they’re
pretty, pretty, pretty good.
To
recap, here’s the case for Rand Paul, millennial hero: He’s against
surveillance and drone strikes, two issues on which the millennial vote
is divided; he’s against comprehensive immigration reform and same-sex
marriage, two things that millennial voters strongly support; he’s
against big government and universal health care, two more things a
majority of millennial voters back; and he likes to talk about getting
people of color to vote for him, despite supporting voter suppression
and the right of businesses to engage in race-based discrimination. Oh,
and he’s comfortable telling the first black president, the one who “
surrounds himself with Martin Luther King memorabilia in [the] Oval Office,” how he’s failing to live up to King’s legacy.
So can we stop with this nonsense now? Please?
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