Colorado Politics

The Colorado Springs Gazette: Young voters want more from politicians

Politicians wooing young and future voters need swift, compassionate solutions to longstanding problems.

Few express this more eloquently than Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, a writer for The Weekly Standard. Author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America,” Anderson discussed the issue with a panel Friday at The Weekly Standard Broadmoor Summit.

“When President Trump won the election, I got asked ‘Do you think this is going to be good or bad for the right’s standing with young voters?’ I said it could go either way,” Anderson explained.

For things to go well, Anderson said, Trump and the Republican majority in Congress would need to radically rethink governance. They would avoid doing things “in an old, slow way.”

“I think, unfortunately – whether it’s the administration’s actions or the media’s coverage thereof, any of that sort of stuff (radical rethinking) is way below the surface and not seen by voters and so you are not seeing young people gravitate toward the right.”

Impromptu tweets by a disruptive president, tax reform, and deregulation are not enough to win loyalty of millennials. Panelists say young voters are more motivated than previous generations by feelings and compassion. They want immediate and tangible results, and more hope for those who struggle.

President Ronald Reagan won two elections by appealing to young voters with a message of transformation. He was a reformist Republican, challenging the party’s 1980s establishment.

Panelist William Kristol, founder and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, said Trump appeals to older voters who resist transformation. The latter approach has no long-term political future, unlike the Reagan Revolution’s 30-year legacy of party worship.

To transform government and cause a new revolution, politicians should focus on a tribunal of low-hanging fruit: 1. health care; 2. infrastructure, and 3. immigration.

Each is a tangible issue important to young generations. Democrats and Republicans seeking office in November would do themselves a favor by offering realistic, definable solutions to one or all of the above.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans offer a better health care system. Young adults rightly expect them to. They are the people faced with decades of paying for the health care and retirements of baby boomers who saddled them with debt.

Under the Affordable Care Act, Americans continue struggling to find care and insurance they can afford.

Mainstream health care solutions offered by the right and left have nothing to do with care. They focus on distribution of coverage by third-party payers. These schemes have no potential for producing more care. Imagine addressing a bread shortage by printing certificates for bread. Food scrip produces no food. It merely determines who gets to have some.

A true solution involves making more bread. Identically, more access to health care at a reasonable price involves creating more care. That means a new approach, in which politicians make laws designed to create more doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics, and all other health care assets the public needs. Ignite an environment in which health care providers compete for patients, reversing a market of patients fighting for care.

As previously suggested in this space, consider proposals to better subsidize the best and brightest undergraduate students to attend medical school. Perhaps direct the Small Business Administration to finance startup clinics and health care innovation. Instruct the Federal Trade Commission to responsibly deregulate, reducing barriers to competitive new health care providers.

Gear government toward a surplus solution. Stop focusing on coverage; start focusing on care.

Just as Democratic and Republican politicians fail at health care, they offer no good solution for the country’s crumbling infrastructure. Democrats want a jobs-killing tax increase few can afford. Republicans want manna from heaven, proposing a $1.5 trillion national infrastructure plan in which local and state governments pay most of the cost with money they don’t have. Each is a nonstarter. All talk, no possible outcome.

A productive infrastructure solution may involve selling government assets into the private sector. Federal land presents one option, which few young voters would accept. Americans love their national parks, forests, nature preserves and grasslands.

Here’s the good news: Americans have no love for paper assets of debt owed to various federal agencies, in the form of loans the government could sell. Offer them to borrowers first, then to banks and other private-sector lenders. Consider liquidating at least $1 trillion in paper assets to stop the escalating cost of deteriorating bridges and roads, which harm the economy and cost too many Americans their lives.

Stop proposing infrastructure solutions that can’t work. Liquidate the funds, put people to work, and solve the problem.

In addressing health care and infrastructure, politicians should consider the potential of bipartisan immigration reform. Properly vetted immigrants can help build highways. Immigrant nurses, physicians, and business entrepreneurs can help establish a more competitive health care market.

Stop distributing worthless health care coverage. Start initiating care.

Anderson is right. Young voters have no interest in the “old, slow way” and yesterday’s worn political cliches and platitudes. They are too smart for all that. They have too much information in the palms of their hands. They want daring politicians to break the mold, to generate immediate and positive results.

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