Last week I published an article on the visit by Chelsea Clinton to Building 12 of Sinclair. The event was supposedly targeted at millennials, yet there’s almost no evidence that the campaign hit their mark. Perhaps the Clinton campaign needs more gun control.
In the room was predominantly middle-aged white women, far from the millennial generation, however to save myself some scrutiny I’ll consider all of the women honorary 21-year-olds.
Where is all this ghostly outreach? We keep hearing about how Clinton’s targeting millennials, yet we never see any shred of evidence that she has either millennial support or any interest in garnering it.
Is it perhaps her health that has lately stunted these efforts? The lack of advertising such a popular event was yet another striking misstep. How does one get those millennials without actually reaching out to them?
No advertising, no advance notice. The earliest I had heard was from a minority woman in her late 20’s who is a Dayton business owner, who was canvassed one-week prior. Most of us received an email some two days prior to the event.
As a student journalist, I’ve attended both Trump and Clinton events. I am also a voter, this will be my second election voting. I’ve gone to rallies and political events even at a young age, for Democratic, Republican and even Independent candidates.
I can say, without a doubt, that the very content of Chelsea’s speech and the topics at Trump events are so very similar it is an astonishing contrast to the 2008 election and even what I experienced as a ten year old in 2004 at campaign events.
The only thing that seemed to even play into the millennial democratic concern checklist was college education. Gee, perhaps a speech at Sinclair Community College could have done more than maybe two minutes about very general statements on even broader goals. Chelsea Clinton was happy to go after Trump’s lack of descriptive and concrete plans, yet provided very little precision herself.
It didn’t matter to the crowd. The non-millennial crowd, certainly fewer than ten. What a massive showing, if only there were some body full of 30,000 some voting-age bodies to have reached out to. Surely, a political campaign that created an event to reach the youth vote wouldn’t be so ignorant and insincere to miss such an opportunity, right?
Perhaps 12:05 p.m. was not the most amicable time for college students on any given Thursday to stop by. The only question from any youth came from a Xavier student who asked how to deal with being persecuted on campus for being a Democratic candidate supporter. Is that really the millennial’s highest concern, people having different perspectives than their own? A privileged life of higher education can afford you such a thing, I suppose.
Is this election going to be the one where the youth vote matters? I don’t know, we’re all a bit too interested in ourselves and not so much in our own self interest.
Barton Kleen
Executive Editor