Britains Corbyn: I got my ideas from Bernie Sanders
By David Weigel July 13 at 3:56 PM
Excerpt:
According to a post-election analysis by Ipsos Mori, over half of eligible British voters under 30 turned out — double the youth turnout rate in some American elections. That led to surprising Labour gains in cities with large universities, with student turnout overturning large Conservative majorities.
“There’s a lesson to be learned from what Corbyn did in the U.K.,” said Sanders in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “The remarkable thing about his election — and he did better than I did — was that among younger people, the voter turnout was as high as it was among the general population. That was unprecedented.”
In recent elections, Democrats have succeeded in pushing up youth turnout just twice — when Barack Obama was on the ballot. In 2010 and 2014, youth turnout plunged. And in this year’s special elections, youth turnout edged up only slightly. In Jon Ossoff’s near miss bid for Georgia’s sixth congressional district, 17.2 percent of the electorate consisted of millennials. That was up from 14 percent in the race’s April primary — but millennials made up 25 percent of all eligible voters.
“If we can take the voter turnout in this country from 60 percent to 70 percent, which is where it was in the U.K., and bring young people into the electoral process, Democrats would win a landslide victory,” said Sanders.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/07/13/britains-corbyn-i-got-my-ideas-from-bernie-sanders/