For most students on this campus, the last year of political news has been one bad story after another.
From the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, to his appointments (or startling lack thereof) to key positions in government, to Republican attempts to “repeal and replace Obamacare” and a whole host of other news before, after and in-between, it has basically been a worst-case scenario for liberals from the end of 2016 up until now.
But luckily, for those students with left-leaning beliefs, the future is looking brighter every day thanks to one reason: you.
Yes, that’s right, millennials are soon to become the largest voting bloc in the entire United States (69 million were eligible to vote in 2016) and that will be a welcome boon for liberal politics. According to a poll conducted by SurveyMonkey, if just millennials had voted in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would have won more than 500 Electoral College votes (remember it takes 270 to win).
And Donald Trump only compounds this generational problem for conservatives, as a new poll by GenForward found, where 57 percent of millennials believed Trump to be an “illegitimate” president. Only 22 percent of millennials approved of Trump’s performance at the time of the poll, compared to 62 percent who disapproved.
I don’t claim to be a psychic, but I’m skeptical that those numbers will improve for President Trump as his tenure matures.
Just think back to a couple of years ago when a 70+ year old self-proclaimed socialist polling within the margin of error pushed the eventual nominee Hillary Clinton to the brink of securing the party’s nomination, largely on the strength of his appeal to young voters. It’s a testament to the potential and enthusiasm of young people that issues like student debt were even debated during the campaign.
This is an exciting trend for the country. Think about how much positive change we, as a generation, could affect in this country.
We could further expand health care coverage in the United States, something that seems to be an inevitability now with the failure of the Trump/Paul Ryan version. We could tackle the issue of global climate change, something that many of our counterparts on the right refuse to acknowledge the existence of or take seriously. We could improve education and make it easier for people to attend college.
Not to mention ensuring the continued growth of the American economy through putting more Democrats in office. Just one example of this comes from California, where the state government imposed the highest state income tax rate in 2012, the vast majority of which was imposed upon the state’s millionaires. Since then, California has grown faster than the rest of the country and is consistently one of the fastest growing states in the nation. Now, it’s even the sixth largest economy in the world, according to numbers from the 2015 Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So, next time you see Donald Trump antagonizing another world leader or country on Twitter, you can at least take some solace in the fact that it’s not likely to last that much longer.
If we survive these next four years, the future looks bright; it also looks decidedly liberal.
Aleksi Pelkonen, a Sports Editor for the Voice, can be reached for comment at APelkonen17@wooster.edu
Tristan: About 30% of the job growth under Obama’s presidency occurred right here in Texas. Houston now sports the world’s largest medical center, the nations most active import/export ship channel. and will soon pass Chicago as the nation’s 3rd largest city. California is buried in state debt due to the fact it pays for at least two generations of city and state employees: those actively working and those retired.
Obamacare does NOTHING for doctors. It does increase their operating costs and lowers their reimbursement for services. Expanding insurance to more Americans does not improve coverage, does not lower costs and does not improve care. Lasik surgery is an out of pocket expense in which the consumer has a vested interest in the cost. Lasik costs half what it did in 1994 and the procedure is far superior today. When patients have ownership of the cost of the service, then prices fall.
Regarding putting more Democrats into office, look at merchandise that 60 years of Democrats in office have generated for Youngstown OH, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, etc. Those cities have almost HALF the populations they had in 1970.They now have high taxes, poorly run public schools with no sense of urgency for innovation, or even discipline in the classroom. High poverty rates, high crime, a 50% HS drop-out rate, and high adult illiteracy. And those schools are run predominantly run by liberals with no Republicans around to disrupt the liberal agenda.
Since 1980, the Youngstown Public School System has gone from 30,000 students down to 6,000 by 2013. I know this because two of my siblings teach there. That’s a clear case of an educational system that is nothing short of a monopoly. It has no urgency to change and to fire poor performers and it can’t bother to enforce a sense of discipline in the classroom.
You can dream about Democrats running all aspects of our government. But it’s worth noting you did not share a single case of where the Democrats have changed the direction of a US city by reforms. You offer no case studies for where things are done well in any major city. California is representative of a 2-income society. Hollywood and Silicon Valley makes up one income bracket while those who clean their homes and send their kids to the schools on the other side of the tracks make up the other.