Max Berger, a former aide on Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, said Biden suffers from a trust deficit with young voters who worry he doesn’t understand their problems and is resistant to ideas that match their scale, whether it’s the Green New Deal or eliminating student debt.
“My hope is they're smart enough to realize it's not a marketing problem, it's a product problem. They're selling the wrong product,” he said. “When he says ‘I think Republicans will go back to normal,’ young people are like: Are you insane?”
Berger said Democrats look like two parties — an older moderate one represented by Clinton and Biden, and a younger progressive party that wants leaders like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. He said that if Biden wants to excite the younger wing, he needs to make policy concessions to the ideas that motivate them and treat them like a coalition partner in a parliamentary system.
“If you're under 35 you grew up under a botched war of choice, a recession, the Trump administration and now a pandemic and potentially another recession,” Berger said. “The expectation of the status quo does not make any sense if you're under 35.
