Shouldn't the headline be "Millennial voters rejecting Jill Stein"?

Don't worry, there is nothing to see our worry about in the 25% of millennial voters who have still yet to accept HRC. Surely she can't be THAT terrible and repulsive a candidate...

Keep carrying that water Dan, I'm sure you will get a cushy job in the Clinton Foundation or her administration.

translation: you kids, get off my lawn! and keep voting out of fear and loathing, not your conscience or aspiration. Work hard kids, someday you might get a job like mine, if you do what you're told.

Hillary Clinton has got to be the luckiest politician in American history.

@2: I'm for the Dem nominee, like I said I would be back before we knew who the Dem nominee would be. If it were Bernie, I'd be backing him just as aggressively. Thank you for playing Slog.

"...my money is on high turnout among Millennial voters." Ha! Want to play poker, Dan?

Bernie supporters have a couple of choices. Vote for Clinton or do something else (which includes voting for a third party candidate or simply not voting). If you vote for Clinton, at some point when you write her, you can mention the fact that you voted for her, and helped get her elected. If a substantial number of Bernie supporters do that, then they could influence the president. Those who choose to not vote for her will, on the other hand, accomplish nothing.

@4: since Bill Clinton put the bug in Trump's ear to run, maybe she's the smartest politician in American History.

@7 That doesn't work unless you have some serious dough you can put into her campaign AND foundation. Hillary is very blatantly pay for play, and, to many people, that's ok.

Thanks for setting the record straight, Dan.

I copied this wholesale from a friend:

Throwing away your vote on a message no one will hear, and which will change no outcome, is sometimes presented as ‘voting your conscience’, but that’s got it exactly backwards; your conscience is what keeps you from doing things that feel good to you but hurt other people. Citizens who vote for third-party candidates, write-in candidates, or nobody aren’t voting their conscience, they are voting their ego, unable to accept that a system they find personally disheartening actually applies to them.

@ 13, THIS.

@ 11, accepting the pragmatic truth of the current situation is not incompatible with working to rectify that situation in the long run. That's what the Sanders campaign was about, and he pragmatically won concessions from Clinton which he is in a position to see she honors.

@ 13, This.

@ 11, or if you possess other political capital, as Bernie Sanders does, and if you use that capital to gain concessions, as Sanders has, and you're in a position to see that she keeps here end of the bargain, as Sanders is.

Alright, either the website is screwy or my browser is. I saw no evidence that 14 had posted - until I posted 15. Sorry for the redundancy.

@13 Right on. I'm stealing that.

This is the same old story Clinton has based her whole campaign on - pretend something is already happening so that you can convince everyone there's no point in fighting the inevitable and you'd better fall in line or something *ooooh scary!* will happen. Are you really that afraid of a village idiot who is imploding as we speak and who isn't even supported by his own party? Or would you have voted for that cheating, money-laundering corporate shill anyway? #14 - good luck to anyone trying to hold her to anything she hasn't been paid for.

I am a Bernie supporter who often votes Green Party in my local elections. I will be voting for Hillary for President. I think Hillary is a pretty terrible candidate, but the Supreme Court hasn't been Liberal since Nixon appointed 4 SC justices. Trump could easily appoint 3 before he is impeached. I disagree with the notion that it is wrong or pointless to vote 3rd party. The only way the Democratic Party would get the message about TPP, super delegates, GMO labeling and several other issues is if they lose an election to one of the worst candidates ever because they have alienated a large portion of their base. If you want to send that message that is fine, but you also have to realize there is real consequences to those actions. All those things you care about will get worse before they get better and liberals probably lose the SC for another 45 years. I would prefer to vote for the person I dislike but will move the issues in the direction I want. Even if that is less left than I want and probably much slower than I want.

I know Hillary now says she is against TPP, but wait until after the election when she says they changed a couple things and they pass it. It is similar to Obama running on transparency and becoming the least transparent President in history. Or him galvanizing progressives to get by Hillary saying he wanted GMO labeling. When he gets into office appointing Monsanto lawyers to key positions in the AG department and recently signing the Monsanto written Dark Act to supersede legitimate State GMO labeling laws. I still believe overall Obama has been a very good President. I believe Hillary can be similar. They aren't always going to do what I want and they are going to cave to corporations that give them bribes. That isn't going to change no matter who we elect. Even if Sanders was elected, Congress would not pass the laws that would change this.

The last major political revolution happened in the 1960's. It was helped by a series of Supreme Court ruling made by the last liberal Court. We have that chance again. President Trump can take that away and reverse progress on many issues. Environmental regulations, healthcare reform, workers rights, medicinal and recreational marijuana can all be rolled back with the wrong President/SC. Is a statement vote worth it? To me the answer is no. Others may feel differently and that is their right. I would suggest saving the statement until 4 years from now when the SC is younger and more settled.

Ah yes the clean conscience. Pristine, pure and clean.What would happen if that candidate you voted for with a morally airtight conscience actually got elected and wound up not unilaterally withdrawing the military from all corners of the earth (because, I don't know, maybe this would be impossible), and then somewhere someone is killed in an American airstrike? Then all of a sudden your pure pristine conscience would be a nasty dirty grubby conscience, all stained and caked with messy messy reality.

@19 Bullshit you vote Green in local elections, they don't field candidates for those races.

And LOL, you think GMOs are an issue.

@21,
It's possible that @19 is writing in various green party members on his/her ballot

You're correct of course in that they don't have established candidates actually appearing on those ballots though since they don't run anyone.

The abused, the disadvantaged and discounted need no 'convincing'.

@13: "your conscience is what keeps you from doing things that feel good to you but hurt other people". Dang, Urgutha, that friend of yours has a way with words.

"The survey shows Clinton trouncing Trump 56%-20% among those under 35, though she has failed so far to generate the levels of enthusiasm Sanders did—and the high turn-out that can signal—among Millennials."

All the survey shows is that Millennials don't like Trump, which isn't news. It doesn't signal anything towards turnout. Other surveys are showing a steady drop in the belief in the American democratic system. Trump is trying to poison the well on the entire electoral process, the Democratic Party apparatus is terribly out of touch with their base and the independents who really decide elections and seem to feel that being pro-choice Reaganites is their best strategy. It's fucking sad. Trump will probably lose, turnout will be low on both sides, and we can only hope that it's low enough on the GOP side that the legislature will start approving executive appointees again.

@5- After all the catty bullshit you leveled at Sanders through the primary (all while claiming to be "equally as supportive") you really have no credibility on this issue. "Thanks for playing, SLOG." is a Bill O'Reilly level comeback, BTW.

The quote at @13 is from this medium article.

https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-su…

@19: absolutely!

If more progressive and liberal minded people would become more active in politics at the local, county, and state levels and VOTE in the interim elections, we might eventually have a Congress that would approve more liberal judges/justices and pass laws that support and a progressive agenda. However, the way elections are financed must be changed. Our Congresspersons spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to obtain donations from Big Money Donors for their (re)election campaigns. Once donations are obtained, they are beholding to their donors whether they like it or not.

@21 @22You are both wrong. I live in Marin County, California. There is Green Party candidates on almost every ballot. They have 7 elected officials in my county mostly on school boards and city councils. Look it up if you don't believe me. I know that isn't a lot and California(especially Marin) is much different than most of the electorate, but that doesn't change the fact that they do run in places they can get elected. I agree they need to gain more support if they want to be looked at as a legitimate option for major races, hence why I am voting for Hillary.

I don't think that GMOs by themselves are a huge issue. When you are creating GMOs so you can dump RoundUp on them and they don't die but everything around them does that is an issue.

I threw away my vote twice in my life. Once in 1992 (19 years old) when I voted for Perot and again in 1999 when I voted for Nader. Never again! So its amazing that Clinton can snag the demographic of voters that either dont vote, or throw their vote away on a third party.

Jill Stein is way to daffy duck crazy for me and whats with all the photos of her having dinner with Putin? WTF is she up to?

@ 13 Great quote from your friend - this is exactly how I see it but I couldn't articulate it.

@21 I have voted for local Green party candidates in my city..last November someone was on the ballot for Sheriff. It is possible. I'm guessing this probably depends on where you live though...

@13: True for the most part, however for a healthy democracy what was once third parties need to become one of the two major parties. So, it's a catch-22 when you get the lesser of two evils situation - but down ballot at least, third parties should get their well-deserved support.

@26,
Ah-ha! I knew my friend couldn't have been that eloquent! :)

@28: So tell me, why should all GMOs need to be labeled if you're just concerned out Roundup Ready crops?

I'm thinking of starting a pool for what the October Surprise is going to be.

@21 et al: Greens run (and sometimes win) here in Chicago too.

@33 I voted for it as a ballot measure because I want to know if GMO ingredients were used in the products I eat. It is similar to labeling the ingredients on food packaging. When they came out with that law did they say only put ingredients that are bad for you on the label? What is supposedly good and bad for you changes every other day. I think having information to decide for yourself is important. I am open to a discussion of how much information is too much and when does it come cost prohibitive. It wasn't a big deal to me when the initiative was not passed in CA because non GMO foods are easy to find. Most producers clearly label them. I think the Dark Act is a terrible bill written only for the benefit of the ConAgra. It is also a perfect illustration of how corporate interests run Washington. Look up the voting roll call and compare to campaign donations. It also illustrated the point of my original post that politicians are going to favor corporations they take their bribes from. Here is an article that talks about this more:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronnie-cum…

@13

You're friends with Clay Shirky?

As a friend, shouldn't you link to the rest of his piece, "There's No Such Thing as a Protest Vote"?

@36: "I think having information to decide for yourself is important."
Therein lies the problem with GMO labeling...

@38 Can you elaborate on why that is a problem?

@37,

See @26 and @32

@37, I knew I'd read those words in an article somewhere.
Dan, is your holiday so boring you have to bait these guys. Trump, day by day, gets crazier and crazier, how is this even an issue anymore.

@31- "The youth vote is always leveraged as a warning to the Democratic Party establishment: every election cycle we are told that young people will not turn out if they are not sufficiently "inspired""

And almost every election cycle percentage of the electorate turning out goes down, almost like the youth vote doesn't suddenly get motivated as they get older. Shrinking the electorate isn't helping the progressive movement or the Democratic Party.

@ 31, the reason there are only two major parties is because of the Electoral College. Since we vote for electors, not president, and since nearly every state awards every electoral vote to the person who wins the most votes, it means that the top two parties are the only ones in contention and it remains that way, no matter how disaffected any part of the electorate is.

Now, that's one thing Dan is right about - a lot of the reason is also because voters focus on the big races while ignoring local politics. Even if you vote every election, if you're not participating you may have no idea who you're really voting for, other than what you perceive their affiliation to mean. (In single party strongholds like Seattle, where Mark Sidran was a Democrat, that can be very misleading.) But when people rally around a Bernie Sanders and then stomp their feet and say they're voting for Stein instead, they're doing nothing effective and actually play their part in the continuance of the two party system, no matter how strongly they feel that they're dealing it a blow.

I saw a very practical lesson in how the electorate buys into the system in another way. Remember 2000, and how Bush won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote? (Never mind everything that happened in Florida - let's assume for the moment that the final recount was fair and that Nader had no effect upon it.) Calls to change the Constitution were laughed at, and in one state, Colorado, a push to make the E.C. more fair by awarding electoral votes in proportion to the state's tally also went down in flames because people don't want to trade the clout we have under the current system for fairness. And that was a prescient sentiment, as Colorado has since transformed from Red to battleground state, and presidential candidates would not fight as hard for our votes if the best they can get is five of nine votes (a margin of just one) versus all nine (a margin of nine). Hell, for just one vote they wouldn't campaign here at all.

This has been the case since the advent of political parties. The only time we had a successful third party was when a major party (the Whigs) suffered such a crisis that the coalition then holding it together came apart over a controversial issue (slavery). So one side joined a new party (the Republicans) while the other side joined the remaining old one (the Democrats). The modern Republicans may well fall apart in the coming years, but I don't see any part of that coalition joining the Greens.

@43: Great insight.

@44: When a value fails to auto increment, there's a tear in the universe.

Mr Savage would be supporting Mr Sanders had he won, and would be probably just as emphatic about the danger posed by Mr Trump, but he'd be handling Mrs Clinton's supporters almost as delicately as he'd be handling Mr Miller.

@43 - It's also because we have a plurality system that allows the winner to be the person who gets the most votes rather than a majority. Some places require run-offs for races that get less than 50% but in most Congressional and Senate races you just have to come in first. I actually like Jill Stein's ranked choice voting plan, which we have for local races in SF. But it would not work unless it happened everywhere, and that can't happen without a Constitutional Amendment which the two parties won't less happen, of course.

Duverger's Law

Nice spin with that headline. It would have been more accurate to say "Millennials are 'meh,' at best, about Hillary Clinton, but they're absolutely repulsed by Trump."

Slog is so out of touch anymore, it's embarrassing. Do you even have any millennial readers left?

@44,

SLOG's been fucked up all day.

#50: Nope, it's all old Capitol Hill gen exers and baby boomers from here on out.

Something I've found gets some traction with people half my age:

Let's make Trump not just lose but go down big. In almost every state. That, and maybe only that, could send a message about where his brand of sexism, racism, demagoguery, and fear-mongering takes a candidate.

If that's the objective, there are no "throw-away" votes even in solidly red or blue states. Every vote for his opponent makes Trump's politics look even less successful. Staying home or Stein-wasting your vote narrows the margin between Trump and Clinton.

Mr Kenai - The big problem with that is that Mrs C will take anything more decisive than 2004 (or perhaps even 2000) as a sign of adoration. Of course, for some, that will be a feature and not a bug. But remember what Francis Urquhart was able to do with the solid backing of just 46% of the populace. There are maybe only two or three politicians whom I feel could be trusted with 60%.

What an improvement it would be if there were two extra ballot lines so that people could vote "against Mr T" or "against Mrs C" rather than having to vote FOR either one of them. It seems that it would be really useful to see the breakdown, and be able to remind the winner of it.

@45- Your first point is irrelevant. The youth vote is generally lower, that doesn't mean they can't become more motivated nor does it demonstrate that people who vote when young aren't more likely to vote when old. They are. They also usually stick with the party they first voted for.

That second chart shows a pretty clear downward trend from the 1960s to the present with a jump for the Obama election, not a steady rate in the last three generations. But nice job finding a visual presentation the appears to support your point when the data doesn't.

@39: Most people who care about whether or not there are GMOs in their food don't have the information and education necessary to accurately assess the associated risks and potential issues.

To add insult to injury, Savage now claims that millennials couldn't tell from day zero that Trump was a gasbag despite corporate media finding him a credible person for decades. Of course, Savage still pretends that he doesn't know that voter turn out is the important number not how many express their feelings from the couch.

@56 these people know that regulatory institutions have been captured by industry, that most of the supporting science is based on industry data (like methane fugitive emissions, whether you like that fact or not) and also, history tells them they shouldn't be giving blank checks to the usual suspects

@47, Venn. You reckon? Hillary supporters are much tougher and usually older, from what I gather. Most of them already went thru an ideological revolution, with much better music.
And guess what, nothing happened. Because they, like the Busters, got all pure about Politics. HaHa.
Politics is the long game, all the boring meetings all the elections. Hard yakka. Luckily that's where Sanders keeps encouraging his mob to go. Get the fuck involved with the day to day of politics, make a real Revution happen. Kick the bastards out.

I'm not saying the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies didn't achieve great advancements.

I think the past few weeks of Trump have made it extremely clear that liking or not liking Hillary or any of her policy positions is essentially irrelevant.

Stopping a Trump Presidency, by any legal and nonviolent means, is the only issue that matters.

I've long been a voice of calm among my peers. I would urge people who hated or were terrified by George W. Bush, or Mitt Romney to take a breath and be calm. The nation would survive regardless of the outcome of the election.

Trump is different. Literally, there is no one comparably dangerous who has been so near the Presidency in the modern era. My voice is not calm in relation to him, because of the astonishing numbers of huge risks his Presidency would bring: everything from a trade war that brings on a global economic depression, to nuclear proliferation gone mad, to the end of NATO, to a Constitutional crisis (would Trump obey the Supreme Court? He may not), to the perversion of the Republic to some sort of strongman authoritarian nightmare.

George W Bush and Mitt Romney did not bring those kinds of risks with them. Trump does. All that matters is defeating him, which means everybody who doesn't suck it up and vote for Hillary is playing a part in bringing on the enormous cavalcade of huge risks that a Trump administration would bring.

I read articles about the corruption in the US, and my blood boils. How has the greatest country on the Earth, in some ways, got to this?
If Trump has done anything positive, he's woken people up to seeing that politics does matter, Voting does matter. And voting with one's head and one's heart.
Hillary is one tough Woman, no one can deny that. Another Obama or Sanders will come along again; in the meantime, she can hold the fort.
I have grown to admire Hillary's good breeding. Her past sins I don't know of, I can imagine them. Her husband would have been a royal pain in the arse to put up with. He's old now, a doting grandfather. She wouldn't have to keep an eye on what he's up to.

There's been a series of tv programmes on over the last few weeks, on The Sixties. Last night it was on the Civil Rights movement. Those guys were brave. Kennedy brothers, lucky they were there. And here we are, all these years later, and race in your country is still such an issue. Then again, a magnificent Black man has been your President for eight years.

@58: Thank you for illustrating my point. :^)

Ms Lava - For one thing, they would be doubly disappointed; for another, Mr Savage would believe it would be correct of them to play the Woman card if he overstepped the line.

I think I long for the days when people would voluntarily resign if it came out that they accepted a vicuna coat. Nowadays, with the vast majority of candidates, there's no there there, just a principle that they have what is most comparable to a Divine Right to Rule.

@63 Your point being that most non-specialists (including yourself in this case) don't have the tools to assess the science? whoop de doo, you must be a genius. In the meantime, ignoring institutional crises won't get you very far.

@65: people freaking out about technology they don't understand based on dangers that aren't real = INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

@67 People oppose GMOs for a myriad of reasons that they understand more or less well, not just those related to human health. People not trusting institutions is a crisis of institutions by definition. Here is primer for you about regulatory capture by Elizabeth Warren: Corporate Capture of the Rulemaking Proc…
So, is she a conspiracy theorist too, jackass.

@68: "People oppose GMOs for a myriad of reasons that they understand more or less well"
o I am laffin

@69 don't forget to wipe the drool off your chin because understanding more or less well is the fate of the average joe, which until extraordinary proof to the contrary includes you, elitist.

@70: I understand the physical and life sciences more or less well, enough to make intelligent conversation and ask meaningful questions if speaking to an expert in a given topic. (In paleontology, sedimentary geology, and evolutionary biology, I'm well on my way to becoming an expert myself.)
But the average Joe? He doesn't understand the issues. (We live in a nation where 40-something percent of Americans believe that humans were divinely created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago, where one in four believe that the modern temperature record isn't to be trusted, and where half are unsure whether or not vaccines cause autism.) And neither do you, apparently; you've expressed strong opinions on the GMO controversy without showing any sign of comprehending the science involved. Still waiting on your list of sensible reasons to oppose genetic modification, by the way.

And yes, I am an elitist insofar as I believe technical decisions should be made by those educated on the issues at hand. If you were under the knife, would you rather have Joe Blow operating? Or would you demand someone who went to medical school and devoted years to understanding and working with human physiology?
What's that? You think the surgeon is somehow better than the layman? Filthy elitist!

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

--Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance", Newsweek, 1/21/1980