Medford/Somerville, MA – Young people have turned out in record numbers for the 2016 GOP primaries and caucuses. Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, researchers at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) – the preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life – today released an analysis of his level of support from young people during this primary election cycle. This briefing examines how Mr. Trump’s support from young voters stacks up with previous Republican nominees, as well as implications for the general election.

The briefing offers findings in response to several key questions:

How did Donald Trump do among young people who voted in the primaries?

• Generally, Donald Trump has received a lower level of support from youth, ages 17-29, than from older voters, particularly those over 45: averaging roughly one-third of the youth vote vs. 43 percent of older voters.
• In the first 21 states for which youth data are available, Mr. Trump won 17 overall and received a plurality of youth votes in just 11.
• As the Republican field narrowed, young people who identified as or with Republicans showed greater levels of support for Mr. Trump in states like Pennsylvania and Indiana.

How does Trump’s youth support compare to that of previous Republican nominees?

• Mr. Trump has received a slightly larger proportion of estimated youth votes in the primary season than previous Republican nominees Senator John McCain (2008) and Governor Mitt Romney (2012).
• In 2016, both parties’ nominating contests remained competitive for many months, which may have driven youth turnout.
• While Republican youth have been underrepresented in recent primary and general elections, this year youth participation in the Democratic and Republican contests has been rather evenly split. Currently, in the states for which data are available for both parties, 55% of young primary participants have voted in Democratic contests, while 45% have voted in GOP contests.

How do young people overall view Donald Trump?

• As a whole, young people view Mr. Trump unfavorably, with young women and non-white youth, who together make up roughly 70 percent of the youth electorate, viewing him even more unfavorably; young people with less formal education have shown greater levels of support in the primaries.
• Our analysis shows that among “solid Republican” youth, 8 out of 10 are non-Hispanic Whites; and this group skews slightly male.
• Among all young eligible voters, 78% do not have a four-year college degree—whether because they have no college experience or because they are in college but have not yet graduated.
• Mr. Trump also performs well with young people who are disillusioned with the overall state of the country.

What are the potential implications for the general election?

• Two major factors may affect Donald Trump’s performance with young voters in November: education and ideology/party affiliation.
• Young people without a four-year college degree—one of Mr. Trump’s strongest constituencies among youth—tend to vote at higher rates in general elections than in primaries. However, their overall turnout is still fairly low. This could inform Mr. Trump’s campaign outreach strategy and suggests a need to mobilize a great deal of non-college youth to move the overall youth electorate in his favor.
• Consistent with the political polarization of the general electorate, about two-thirds of young people who participated in the Republican primaries identified as conservatives rather than moderates.  However, like many young voters today, young Republican primary participants were less likely than older voters to identify with the Republican Party.

For CIRCLE’s full briefing, please see here. CIRCLE’s 2016 Election Center will continue to offer new data products and analyses providing a comprehensive picture of the youth vote, including a forthcoming analysis of the presumptive Democratic nominee Secretary Hillary Clinton. CIRCLE researchers also will provide insight into key states where young people have the potential to shape the 2016 general election, as rated in CIRCLE’s Youth Electoral Significance Index.

Philippe Boulet-Gercourt has a long article in the French magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur) entitled “The Ten Sins of Hillary.” He quotes me saying, “I see her as someone very sensitive to what is possible and what is not, you watch her thinking in real-time, seeking the right answer that takes all the constraints into account. … Her answers can be complex because she attempts to answer honestly. [She’s] a political junkie and, in a way, it is a mark of sincerity!” (I was interviewed in English, my words were translated into French, and here I translate back.)

I am open to objections to what I said. First, it could be that the center-left in the US imposes these constraints on itself unnecessarily, to its detriment. For instance, if you’re a “serious” politician, you never say that we should float bonds to pay for infrastructure. That is what economists would recommend, but you don’t say it because it’s supposed to be politically impossible to advocate borrowing and spending. By censoring yourself, you narrow the range of what actually is possible, and you come across as pervasively dishonest because it’s clear that you’re for things that you won’t defend. Arguably, HRC is Exhibit One of that phenomenon. Second, one could assemble a list of specific prevarications or evasions from her long career. Third, maybe people don’t trust her because of her gender.

But I still think that genuine efforts to be realistic can look dishonest, especially in contrast to passionate statements that pay no heed to constraints. In January 2003, I posted on this blog about my day’s work with a class of kids who were conducting an oral history project on the desegregation of Prince George’s County (MD) schools. They were all students of color, and they were exploring (with me) how their school had been de jure white until Brown v Board of Education, was then integrated for a time, and is now diverse but minus a substantial white population.

One interviewee [had been] the first African American student at the school. (He was still the only one when he graduated three years later). He said: “Initially I was actually hoping that it wouldn’t work. My parents had said that if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. … Instead of violence, there were three years of hostility.” His main motivation was to be “part of something bigger,” the Civil Rights Movement. He later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing—and easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness.

He wouldn’t say much about how he personally felt about integrating the school. Our next speaker was a current member of the County Council, a white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer and who spoke very passionately about his commitment to integration. I was mildly suspicious of him; the kids loved him. Our reactions were different, probably not because of age or other demographics characteristic but just because assessments of character are subjective. But I do think it’s possible that I was right to trust the speaker who was guarded and private more than the guy who said exactly what his audience wanted to hear. The question is whether HRC faces the same problem.

Pew reports: “Highly educated adults – particularly those who have attended graduate school – are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades.” Indeed, “more than half of those with postgraduate experience (54%) have either consistently liberal political values (31%) or mostly liberal values (23%).”

Based on that finding, one might assume that the most educated Americans stand the furthest left on our political spectrum. And, based on that premise, one might conclude that …

• The people who would benefit most from left-of-center policies don’t support those policies, and the people who do support those policies don’t benefit from them–which is a paradox. OR …
• Liberal programs are special-interest subsidies for people with advanced educations (like lawyers, physicians, and teachers), and that is why they vote for them.
• Progressives tend to be smug or condescending because we tend to be highly educated and convinced that we support policies that are better for other people–and this is an unattractive attitude that loses votes.
• Colleges and graduate schools are moving people left (either because they have ideological agendas or because “reality has a liberal bias”).

I’d actually propose a different view from any of the above. Pew does not find that highly educated people are the furthest left. Rather, people with the most schooling consistently give answers that are labeled liberal on a set of 10 items that range over economic, foreign, and social policies. None of the survey questions offers a radical opinion as an option. So Pew is measuring consistency, not radicalism.

Ideological consistency is correlated with education, but not necessarily for a good reason. More book-learning makes you more aware of the partisan implications of adopting a stance on any particular issue. So, for instance, conservatives are more likely to disbelieve in global warming if they have more education–because their education helps them (as it helps everyone) to see the ideological valence of this issue.

Many of the most educated Americans endorse a certain basket of political ideas that are associated with the mainstream Democratic Party. They have learned to recognize these policies as the best ones, and the policies are designed to appeal to them. All of the positions are labeled “liberal,” so the most educated are deemed liberals. Yet the most educated are not the most committed to equality. Instead, they are quite comfortable with their advantages, even as they endorse positions that Pew calls liberal.

To test that hypothesis, I wanted to look at a survey question about equality that has been asked over a long time period with large samples. The best I found was this American National Election Study question: Do you agree that society should make sure everyone has equal opportunity? This is not an ideal measure, because support for equal opportunity is not the most egalitarian possible position. If you are very committed to equality, you may prefer equal outcomes. Still, the question provides useful comparative data.

In 2012, the more education you had, the less likely you were to favor equality of opportunity. The whole population was less supportive than they’d been in 2008 and less supportive than at any time in the 1980s. But the least educated were the least supportive of equality during the Reagan years, and now they are the most concerned about it.

As of 2012, the most educated Americans are the least egalitarian, even though they are consistently “liberal.” Less than half of them strongly favored equality of opportunity.

It’s true that Democrats and liberals are (as of 2012) more likely to support equal opportunity than Republicans and conservatives are–and that the highly educated are the most liberal. However, the correlations between egalitarianism and partisanship or ideology are not tight. Forty percent of Republicans strongly agree that society should make sure everyone has equal opportunity, as do 30 percent of extreme conservatives. This is partly because conservatives also have an equal opportunity agenda, and partly because the liberal-to-conservative scale is defined by a whole basket of issues. It’s quite possible to be a strong liberal and yet not believe strongly in equality. And I think that is a common view among the most educated Americans–who are also the most advantaged.

Federal Judge Judge Thomas D. Schroeder has upheld a whole series of voting laws in North Carolina that, in my view, create barriers to participation. The plaintiffs included the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and the United States Department of Justice. My colleague Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and I submitted expert testimony about the impact of the laws on youth. We were both deposed in the case, and I testified in federal court last summer. I don’t have an informed comment on the judge’s decision, much of which concerns matters of constitutional interpretation on which I do not claim any expertise. It’s a disappointing result, but the struggle for equitable and accessible voting continues.

Although not a conservative, I have sincere respect for conservative thought, because I think its core insight is human limitation. We human beings are too frail cognitively and morally to change societies wholesale without bad consequences.

You can come to that insight from a religious background, thinking that human beings are sinful but that we receive invaluable guidance from the divine. You can be completely secular, like Friedrich von Hayek, and argue that people lack the cognitive capacity to understand or manipulate something as complicated as a modern society, so we shouldn’t try to manage it centrally. Or you can be a cultural traditionalist, like Edmund Burke, and presume that much trial-and-error is embedded in all local traditions, whereas novel ideas are likely to go wrong, especially when imposed from without or above.

Regardless of your entry point, the conservative premise of human limitation leads to certain biases or tendencies: against central governments, against radical reforms, and in favor of durable constitutions, markets, and common law.

Of course, there is another side to each of those arguments, and I often land on the progressive rather than conservative side. (Just for instance, I don’t think that modern capitalist economies are really distributed systems that avoid top-down control; I think they are disruptive forces run by a few arrogant people.) But the conservative perspective is always worth serious consideration.

By this light, Donald Trump is not only the least conservative candidate in the current field, but the most anti-conservative candidate I can think of in modern American history. His whole argument is against human limitation. He promises that he can make everything radically better by applying his own amazing brainpower. He acknowledges none of the constraints prized by conservatives: religious revelations, cultural norms, constitutional checks, limited government in a mixed economy, or common law. I think his strong support in the primaries underlines the fact that the Republican electorate had become anti-conservative in basic ways, although a genuinely conservative GOP core is horrified by his campaign. As they should be, because he is the diametrical opposite of what is most valuable in conservatism.

See also: What defines conservatism; Edmund Burke would vote Democratic; and the left has become Burkean.

There has been lots of debate this week about whether various people are qualified to be president. Peter Shane once observed that the US Constitution, Art. II, § 1, ¶ 5, renders all the current candidates ineligible:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

It seems that to be president, you have to have been either a natural-born citizen or a citizen of the US on June 21, 1788, the date when the Constitution was ratified. Zachary Taylor was three-and-a-half years old at the time, so eligible. Millard Fillmore was born in 1800, so unqualified–along with all of his successors. It’s that second comma that makes it so. And we know that every jot and tittle of the Constitution is perfect.

(Those wacky Framers.)

Hillary Clinton told Glenn Thrush last Friday: “There is a persistent, organized effort to misrepresent my record, and I don’t appreciate that, and I feel sorry for a lot of the young people who are fed this list of misrepresentations. … I know that Senator Sanders spends a lot of time attacking my husband, attacking President Obama. I rarely hear him say anything negative about George W. Bush, who I think wrecked our economy.’”

It is very strongly in Clinton’s interest to stop talking this way. Indeed, she should adopt almost exactly the opposite position. There is room to her left on the ideological spectrum. Sanders voters are in that space. Many of them happen to be young, but it’s their beliefs that line them up with the Sanders campaign. Clinton will need their votes in November. They will be weighing whether to vote for her–or stay home. She must communicate very clearly that she respects their positions, that they are the future of her party, that she has a different “theory of change” from theirs but is open to learning from them, and that the Democratic primary debate has been dignified, substantive, and valuable.

Instead, she is implies that they are naive and callow youth who would vote for her if they hadn’t been misled about her personal contributions by a cynical pol. It would be difficult to devise a message with more power to alienate a pivotal group of potential supporters.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have almost nothing in common, except that each campaign is now struggling with its respective party over the rules for selecting and binding delegates. Google News finds these recent headlines: “Trump backers: ‘There will be war’ over disputed delegates,” “Superdelegate system favors Hillary Clinton, say Bernie Sanders voters”–and more than 100,000 more.

Many people will take a side in this argument depending on who they want to win the nomination. They don’t necessarily have an opinion about parties in general. But some Sanders and Trump voters may believe–as a general principle–that the major parties should play very limited roles. That stance is consistent with other aspects of their candidates’ general worldviews. In that case, they will have principled (not merely tactical) reasons to want to strip the parties of discretion.

There are at least two general and current theories of political parties in the US.

On the older view, a party is an association in civil society. It is entitled to organize itself according to its own rules, and people will join if they agree or can stay away if they don’t. Like all associations, a party should consider rules that empower its leaders and core members over casual participants. For one thing, associations want to reward dedicated service. One reason that Democrats have Superdelegates is to make sure that their most devoted members–the ones who have given lots of time to the party itself–can attend and vote at the Convention. Second, like other associations, a party can select individuals to be trustees of its long-term interests. In acting as trustees, the leaders are empowered to check majorities to protect what they consider the best interests of the association. So Republican Rules Committee members who block Trump can argue that they are protecting the GOP.

On the newer view, the parties simply manage the first stage of a two-stage electoral process. In the US, we could use nonpartisan general elections in which all qualified candidates appeared together on the ballot. But then, in most elections, no one would get a majority, and we’d either have to organize a run-off election for the two top vote-getters or allow a person with well under 50% of the vote to take office. Instead, we structure elections so that people first have to compete within one party, and then the parties’ nominees square off in November, producing (usually) a clear winner. Insofar as this is simply a mechanism for organizing a two-stage election, the parties are responsible to the whole public for managing an open, equitable process. The candidate with the most primary votes should always win each party’s primary, and probably the primary should be open to anyone regardless of party registration. That allows any citizen to exercise an equal right to vote in a two-stage election.

Note that the second theory would be appealing to anyone who holds the view of the American Framers or French republican revolutionaries–that parties are odious factions that shouldn’t really exist at all. If parties evolve into highly regulated means for managing two-stage elections, they will cease to be factions, in the bad sense. But then it would be odd that in addition to managing one stage of our election system, they are also expected to campaign for candidates and issues.

The theory of parties as voluntary associations sustained a heavy–and well-deserved–blow when the Supreme Court made a series of rulings against discriminatory practices within the Democratic Party. The Texas party, for instance, had restricted primary voting to whites on the basis that it was a private association devoted to white supremacy. Thurgood Marshall argued successfully against that rule in Smith v Allwright (1944), in which the Court found:

The United States is a constitutional democracy. Its organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state because of race.  This grant to the people of the opportunity for choice is not to be nullified by a state through casting its electoral process in a form which permits a private organization to practice racial discrimination in the election.

That was only one of a long series of cases, and I am not well informed about all the constitutional issues. However, I think that Smith v Allright is consistent with both theories of parties that I outlined above. One reading of the case is that parties are private associations that can make their own rules; they just cannot discriminate on the basis of race (or other constitutionally relevant characteristics that may arise in other cases). An alternative reading is that the parties now fulfill a state function in our “constitutional democracy,” and they must fully honor the equal rights of all voters. Then any rule or practice that stands in the way of open primaries and majority rule would be unconstitutional.

The courts have not gone so far as reach that second conclusion. What we have in practice is a hybrid. Parties are voluntary associations in civil society that are allowed to protect their own interests and favor their core members. Yet they are seen as performing an essential function for the democracy as a whole and must honor democratic principles. That means there is room for constant debate about party rules, and the disagreement is not just about who should be nominated but also about what kind of thing a party should be.

See also my article from last week, “The waning influence of American political parties,” in The Conversation and in US News.

This graphic is the focus of Aaron Blake’s Washington Post article entitled “74-year-old Bernie Sanders’s remarkable dominance among young voters, in 1 chart.” As Blake writes, “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are well on their way to becoming their parties’ 2016 nominees for president. Among young voters, though, Bernie Sanders has more votes than both of them — combined.” The source is CIRCLE’s analysis released today.