National Service Won’t Win More Men for Democrats
You may have heard that Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling to win male voters, and young male voters in particular. Unsurprisingly, the pundit class has been lining up to offer Harris advice on how to change that.
Some of the advice leaves me wondering if these pundits have ever actually met any young men.
Take this op-ed published by The New York Times on October 21. Author John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, suggests that Harris needs to “go big,” offering “a bold vision that speaks to [young men’s] desire for purpose and strength” and reignites “the hope of the emerging generation.” OK, OK, and just how should she do this? By making a “sweeping national call to both military and civilian service” called the “Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America,” writes Volpe, going on to extoll the virtues of mandatory national service.
Because if there’s one way to young men’s hearts, it’s…forced volunteer work? Hmmmm.
To illustrate why this could work, Volpe links to a Hill op-ed by New York attorney Steve Cohen, who wrote that in a poll he sponsored himself (and does not link to), 75 percent of young people supported the idea of mandatory national service. I found a basic overview of this poll on Cohen’s website. It was not conducted by a polling firm but by using online software called QuestionPro. It included about 1,000 participants, with roughly half between the ages of 18 and 24, and just 33 percent men. It does not say how participants were recruited, whether they constituted a nationally representative sample, or how the poll was conducted.
Meanwhile, a 2017 Gallup Poll found that 57 percent of respondents under age 30 opposed the idea of a mandatory year of national service for young Americans and only 39 percent supported it.
As for a “sweeping call” to military service, I don’t think we need polling to tell us how this would play out. Young people face no shortage of enticements to join the military, and not a lot of barriers to doing so. That they don’t enlist in larger numbers probably suggests that there’s not a huge audience out there for political candidates who want to talk them into it.
Another suggestion—albeit much less sweeping in scope—that keeps gettin
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