Why Bernie Sanders is the Right Candidate for College-Aged Voters

Sanders understands the issues young people face

With the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary process underway, this is a critical moment to start investing time and energy into your pick for the nominee. In the majority of polls, the top three candidates in the race are Senator Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren. 

A Forbes Under 30 Voter Survey recently shared that Sanders is the most popular candidate among those voters, polling in at 32 percent. Biden follows with 16 percent, and Warren with nine percent. Sanders is not only the best choice for the presidency, he is also overwhelmingly the best choice for college-aged voters.

Every week, we, as members of Santa Clara Students for Bernie—a student-run offshoot of the Sanders campaign—dedicate time to organizing fellow Broncos around Sanders’ campaign—perhaps you have seen us canvassing around campus—and though there are a myriad of issues that students have told us they care about, we’ll just address the most popular ones here. 

Sanders is the best choice for the presidency because he has the most comprehensive understanding of the issues that affect young people and the bravest ideas on how to help us tackle them. 

Sanders is a champion of the Green New Deal and recognizes the climate crisis for what it is: an emergency. 

According to his campaign, Sanders wants to create an “inclusive movement that prioritizes young people, workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and other historically marginalized groups to take on the fossil fuel industry and other polluters.” 

Under the Green New Deal, the U.S. will completely decarbonize our energy system by 2050 and create millions of jobs in the process. 

Sanders is the only candidate with plans big enough and inclusive enough to give our planet a fighting chance against environmental collapse.

The future is grim when millions of young people leave school suffocating under the money they owe for daring to better themselves through education. Forty-five million borrowers in America have a combined total of 1.6 trillion dollars in debt—you are most likely a part of that, as are we. 

Sanders is the only candidate who has promised to cancel all student debt; no person will have to jump through hoops in order to qualify for relief. Sanders also plans to invest handsomely in historically black colleges and universities, as well as other minority-serving institutions, in order to address the difference in amounts of student debt that often appears between students of color and their white peers. Can you imagine entering your adult life without your debt immediately chaining you down? 

Sanders has a strong plan to get money and corruption out of politics in order to help us as we strive for true and full democracy. Some of the highlights of his initiatives in this arena include severely limiting corporate political contributions, giving the Federal Election Committee the authority to actually enforce financing regulations, and nominating justices that will fight to overturn Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United which say money is speech. The absence of solutions like these have allowed corporations to spend unlimited money to buy elections away from the people. Under Sanders’ presidency, this will end.

Finally, Sanders is a champion of universal healthcare: he has pledged to guarantee healthcare as a human right to everyone through a single-payer Medicare for All program. For young people, healthcare can range from an immediate issue hindering our life to something we’ve never thought twice about. Yet this is an issue that affects everyone. 

Many people in America are uninsured or severely underinsured, and go into immense medical debt just trying to visit the doctor; many others have died in an effort to avoid medical bills in the first place. After age 26, we will all have to deal with the healthcare system on our own if we haven’t already—but thankfully, Sanders has us covered.

While on stage at a campaign rally with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a few months ago, Sanders asked the crowd of 26,000 people a series of questions that he believes all of us should be asking ourselves as we think about what characteristics we want in a candidate and what, as young people, matters to us. 

“Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt, even if you are not?” said Sanders. “Are you willing to fight for a future for generations of people who have not yet even been born, but are entitled to live on a planet that is healthy and habitable?”

If you truly contemplate what is at stake here—our health and the preservation of our planet, access to education for all, a political system that is guided by values rather than greed—then the only choice for our generation is yes, we must act in a way that is transformative and compassionate. Register to vote before Feb. 18. Vote for Senator Bernie Sanders on March 3.

Sasha Todd is a senior ethnic studies major and Alexa Alfano is a junior English major.