Thread by @whstancil

Biden's second-worst demographic - not relative to expectations, but OVERALL - is the highly liberal 18-34 age group. 21% approve. He's 47 points underwater. And yet DC still reflexively assumes moderation is the cure, rather than the cause, of the problem poll.qu.edu/poll-release?r…

Biden's approval among 18-to-34-year-olds is literally lower than Trump's was, in the same Quinnipiac poll in March 2018! Hard to overstate what a shocking failure this is for a Democratic administration.

What official DC cannot seem to grasp is that all the stuff that seems self-evidently correct to them (be boring, focus on dry econ issues, reassure people that the comfortably familiar cast of old white guys is in charge, punch left) now actively antagonizes a huge Dem base bloc

There's an enormous generational split in politics - in this poll, Biden might be -47 with the young but he's actually POSITIVE with people over 65, at 48/46 - but all the voices talking about politics in elite circles come from one side of that split and can barely perceive it

US elites often worry they're in a liberal bubble, and obsess over reaching out to the conservative hinterland. They ARE in a bubble, but on the opposite side than they realize: THEY'RE the status quo moderates, and the groups they're ignoring are the people they think irrelevant

You want to fix Democratic politics? Start listening more to the handful of Dem voices on the other side of this split. They're easy to spot, they stand out, like AOC. Their success seems bizarre to official DC because they're succeeding in groups official DC doesn't perceive.

At the very least deploy some common sense here, Dems. Who better understands voters under 50:

1. People who have used Instagram before, or
2. People who have been national pols since before tape cassettes?

But the entire party is keyed to the instincts of the latter group.