Solomon writes: "Fifty-two years after young people changed history with the New Hampshire primary election, a new generation is ready to do it again - this time by mobilizing behind Bernie Sanders."
Young Bernie Sanders supporters hold Bernie posters before a campaign rally. (photo: Peter Foley/EPA)
27 January 20
ifty-two years after young people changed history with the New Hampshire primary election, a new generation is ready to do it again — this time by mobilizing behind Bernie Sanders.
During early 1968, thousands of young people volunteered in New Hampshire to help the insurgent presidential campaign of Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy — who went on to stun the party establishment by winning 42 percent of the state’s primary vote against President Lyndon Johnson’s 49 percent. Three weeks later, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election.
What propelled McCarthy and his young supporters into the snows of New Hampshire was their opposition to the war in Vietnam. Five decades later, in effect, what’s propelling Bernie Sanders and his young supporters is the grim reality of class war in America.
The New Hampshire Youth Movement — which its leadership calls “the largest youth power organization in the state” — endorsed Sanders last week. NHYM could provide the margin of victory in New Hampshire’s Feb. 11 primary.
The strategy has been methodical. “People involved with NHYM have been canvassing nonstop,” the state director of the organization’s field program, Dylan Carney, told me. “We’ve gathered over 9,500 pledge-to-vote cards from people aged 18 to 25 and will be working to get them voting for Bernie Sanders on Feb. 11th.”
I asked Carney for his assessment of why polling nationwide shows young people prefer Sanders over every other Democratic contender by a lopsided margin.
“Sanders is a movement candidate — who will be accountable to our generation,” Carney replied. “He has proven that he is aligned with the version of the world that we want to create. And since before our generation was born, he was fighting the injustices that we are fighting today.”
New Hampshire Youth Movement is a natural ally of the Bernie 2020 campaign, as the organization’s website makes clear:
After living in New Hampshire for all of his 23 years, Dylan Carney is keenly aware that the state’s margin of victory often hinges on a small number of votes. When he says that “we have the reach to turn out 10,000 young voters for Bernie Sanders,” he quickly adds that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire by only a few thousand votes in 2016 while the incumbent Republican senator Kelly Ayotte was unseated by just 1,017 votes.
Young voters have the potential to make Bernie Sanders the winner of the New Hampshire primary — and young voters across the country have the potential to make him president of the United States.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
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