On Tuesday, Bernie Sanders swept to victory in the New Hampshire primary over rival Hillary Clinton.
To be sure, Sanders was expected to win. Handily.
Still, there’s something surreal about the fact that America is edging ever closer to a situation that will see an avowed socialist square off against one of the country’s quintessential capitalists for the keys to The White House.
As we and others have documented, the American electorate is fed up with politics as usual in Washington. Many voters have no hope that the system can be changed as long as both parties continually field mainstream, establishment candidates all of whom are connected to powerful lobbyists, Wall Street, and corporate America.
So disgruntled are Americans that the candidates with the most buzz around their campaigns are Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
The capitalist and the socialist.
Against that backdrop we present the following interesting chart from a recent YouGov survey and brief color from WaPo. As you can see, respondents younger than 30 now rate socialism more favorably than capitalism. We suppose it’s all that good will towards Wall Street.
From WaPo's Catherine Rampell:
In my column today, I mentioned that one reason millennials prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton is that they’re not just willing to look past Sanders’s socialism — they actually like his socialism. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Here are some of the data I was referring to.
In a recent YouGov survey, respondents were asked whether they had a “favorable or unfavorable opinion” of socialism and of capitalism. Below are the results of their answers, broken down by various demographic groups.
Democrats rated socialism and capitalism equally positively (both at 42 percent favorability). And respondents younger than 30 were the only group that rated socialism morefavorably than capitalism (43 percent vs. 32 percent, respectively).
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"Feel the Bern"...