Emmett Rensin at Newsweek "Gets It"

Why is Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton underperforming among young voters?

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Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum blames Bernie Sanders. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait agrees. The Daily Beast’s James Kirchick says “cynicism” and an inexplicable aversion to permanent imperial war are the problem. New Republic’s Brian Beutler, contra Kirchick, offers a take so hot that it has single-handedly revised global climate change projections: Young voters are insufficiently familiar with the horrors of the Bush administration. The given causes vary but the consensus is clear: Young voters are pathological and the cure is to disabuse them of their ignorance.

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A wild theory: There is no pathology here. Only politics. It’s maddeningly simple.

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Many younger American voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton’s chances, have significant ideological differences with the candidate.

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Hillary Clinton does not support single-payer health care; Young voters do. Hillary Clinton is among the more hawkish members of the Democratic Party; Young voters are not. Hillary Clinton is a capitalist, and even within a capitalist party, she is in both perception and in practice unusually comfortable with capitalism’s worst practices. Millennials, by contrast, reject the entire economic system by a bare majority. They are no great fans of financial institutions or free trade. This should not be surprising in a year when very few voters of any age group are particularly enthusiastic about their prospects.

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The liberal punditry might be forgiven for underestimating the depth and seriousness of these differences had these young people not voted overwhelmingly and across all other demographic lines for a different candidate. The Clinton campaign might be forgiven for imagining these voters would “come home” had it not spent the weeks since the Democratic Convention fundraising and playing Bush administration endorsement bingo. The trouble is not that young people are insufficiently familiar with the neoconservative horror show of their own childhoods. The trouble is that the candidate they are meant to support does not appear to find that show particularly horrifying.

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[S]urely if we are going to begin assigning blame for a theoretical Trump Presidency we ought to assign it to the generations actually breaking for Donald Trump.

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I would like to suggest that the threat these young voters pose to technocratic liberalism is not the possibility of electing Donald Trump. Despite Clinton’s flagging numbers, her chances of success remain high. Rather, the fear is that if younger voters really are committed to a host of ideological positions at odds with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, then that Party, without a Trump-sized cudgel, is doomed.

  Newsweek

I would be encouraged except for the fact that I think the Republicans have a whole host of Trump-sized cudgels waiting in the wings.  And, I think one of the reasons all these other pundits are coming up with silly analyses of Hillary's "millennial problem" is that the Clintons are going to be needing an excuse if Hillary doesn't make it to the White House, and they're preparing the way.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.