Why younger voters must participate in the 2020 presidential primaries

Over the past couple of months I have met with well over a dozen college classes at CSU-Sacramento and Consumes River College in Elk Grove, CA. I have had one-on-one conversations with many more eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 35.

A common theme is that many younger voters believe the 2016 Democratic nomination was “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton.

It is true that Clinton won the popular vote by 389 delegates. However, it was widely known months before the Democratic National Convention that most of the 649 “superdelegates” controlled by the DNC would be pledged to Clinton on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention. This fueled the perception that Clinton could not be beaten. In fact, numerous people I talked with voted for Clinton, even though they may have preferred Bernie Sanders, because they believed their vote for Sanders would be a wasted vote. In fact, had the majority of superdelegates been pledged to Sanders the result would have been very different.

Consequently, voter turnout among eligible voters aged 18-35 in the general election was the lowest of any age group, in part because they believed the process was rigged against the candidate the majority of them supported.

In 2018, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted to make it impossible for superdelegates to have the deciding vote on the first ballot at a national convention. In practical terms this means that superdelegates cannot vote in the first voting round if their support is going to decide the selection. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round, superdelegates get to vote in subsequent rounds.

While I would have preferred that the superdelegate process be eliminated entirely, the restructuring of superdelegates by the DNC going onto the 2020 election is, in my opinion, recognition that the process was flawed.

Eligible voters aged 18 to 35 will be the largest eligible voting block going into the 2020 election. They have the power to decide the future they will inherit. They must vote in the primaries if they want their preferred candidate to make it to the general election.