Paul Bass Photo
Dean at Yale Wednesday night.
The Democratic Party’s hope for revival in the Age of Trump depends on aging baby boomers giving up their power so millennials can take over.
Make that “first globalists.” Not “millennials.”
Howard Dean, a doctor and a politician by trade, offered that prescription Wednesday night during two gatherings with Yale student Democrats.
“I don’t think the struggle is a left versus right struggle anymore. It’s a young versus old struggle,” he told 10 undergraduate members of the Yale College Democrats who won a lottery to pick his strategic brain in a private session before he spoke publicly before three dozen students in WIlliam Harkness Hall.
Dean, who’s 68, recently followed his own advice. He entered, then dropped out of, the race for Democratic National Committee chairman, the post he previously held. “After I thought about it,” he said in an interview, “I thought to myself, ‘If you want these young people to believe in the party again, then you’ve got to have somebody their age, not my age.’”
He urged Yale students to run for alder or state representative or other public offices, especially in red or purple states. Democrats need to run for office everywhere, not just where they have a majority of voters, he argued.
Dean, a former Vermont governor, pursued a similar strategy when he presided over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009. He called it the “50-state strategy.” He groomed candidates and supported them with party dollars in all 50 states. That strategy laid the groundwork for Democrat Barack Obama to win the 2008 presidential election with majorities in states that often vote Republican.
At the strategy session with “lottery” winners.
In 2004, Dean was the first major presidential candidate to use the internet to excite the “netroots,” web-savvy idealistic young people otherwise disconnected from political institutions. Though he didn’t win the party’s nomination, his strategy endured, and was mastered by the Obama campaign.
So Dean had bonafides on which to preach Wednesday night.
“It’s time that our generation went to the sidelines and coached younger people to get into the institutions,” he argued. “Young people don’t care about institutions. They don’t like them.
“Now they’ve realized because of the election of Trump they have to to get involved in institutional politics. We should learn from them as well as they learn from us. There are too many of us who are in our sixties and seventies. If you want a party that works, your leadership has to look like the people they need.”
During a question and answer period, one student plugged the DNC chair bid of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who’s 34. Dean didn’t say he’s necessarily backing Buttigieg. (Before the talk he did say Buttigieg is one of his two final choices.) But Dean used the student’s support as an example of how young people can harness their potential power: He suggested they bombard DNC members with emails promoting Buttigieg’s candidacy.
Dean noted that the millennials — or as he dubbed them, “first globalists,” 20-somethings who embrace diversity, tolerance, women’s rights, global interaction, economic justice, evidence-based decision-making — have supported the past three Democratic presidential candidates in bigger numbers than any other age group. But because the generation tends to avoid established institutions, he said, its members have hesitated to join the Democratic Party itself and assume leadership.
The two major-party presidential candidates in the 2016 campaign were 69 and 70 years old; the favorite of Democratic millennials was in his mid-70s. In Connecticut, several leading Democrats in their 60s are considering gubernatorial runs.
If the Democratic Party hopes to thrive and survive, the 20 and 30 somethings need to start filling those and other top spots, Dean argued (without, when specifically asked, taking a stand on the Connecticut governor’s race).
He spent much of the evening telling students about their generation, then urging them to step up.
“Your generation is much less ideological,” Dean informed them. “Your generation is more respectful than we were. You care about the facts…. You care about metrics…. You don’t like institutions….. You are very committed social activists…. You are incredibly polite with others.”
Which is great — but it’s also important to “have to be willing to challenge others. You don’t have to be mean,” Dean told the lottery-winning small group of students in the initial roundtable discussion. He urged them to make a point of discussing “white privilege” and other difficult topics with people who disagree with them.
In response to a student question, he agreed Connecticut should join the emerging compact of states pledging their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections. He called the electoral college outdated. He endorsed “ranked choice voting” — which communities in Maine and his home state of Vermont have adopted — as a way to make campaigns more civil and convince people that their vote makes a difference. (Read more about that here.)
Dean also argued against confirming Trump’s nominee for the vacant U.S. Supreme Court seat, Neil Gorsuch. Click on the above video for a conversation about that.
