Republicans tell outright lies. Democrats leave out key pieces of the truth that would lead to a more nuanced argument. Bernie had unprecedented support from the youth. Was it enough to overcome their parents and/or grandparents who opposed them? Not yet at least.

"In both of his campaigns, Sanders won younger voters by historic margins, and he won them not with style or charisma but with perhaps the most brusquely ideological platform in Democratic primary history. His five-year struggle simultaneously reflected, galvanized, and shaped the worldview of an entire generation of voters — forging a new and serious bond between the material conditions of Americans under forty-five and the Sanders brand of “class-struggle social democracy.”

As Jacobin’s Connor Kilpatrick has argued, Bernie’s dominance with young voters is significant for at least two reasons that should shape left strategy in the 2020s. First, despite the understandable skepticism about “generational politics,” there is simply no precedent in US history for an ideological candidate winning younger voters on a scale like Sanders did — not George McGovern and certainly not Barack Obama, whose youthful support was much thinner and less evenly distributed. In the 2008 race against Hillary Clinton, Obama won voters under thirty in California by 5 points, and in Texas by 20 points. This year, against a larger primary field, Bernie won that group in both those states by at least 50 points.

In both his campaigns, Sanders won young white voters, he won young black voters, and he won young Latino voters — the latter group by outrageous margins (84 percent!) in states like California. Very probably, he won young Asian voters, young Muslim voters, and young Native voters with similar levels of enthusiasm.

Second, Sanders did not just win big with kids fresh out of school: across five years of campaigning, he showed persistent strength with middle-aged voters in their forties. Of the twenty states that conducted exit polls, more voters under forty-five chose Sanders than all the “moderate” Democrats combined (Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar) in sixteen of them.

In Missouri and in Michigan, he won voters between forty and forty-five outright. And in key states like Texas, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, where Bernie lost overall, he still managed to win voters under fifty by double digits.

Notoriously, these younger voters did not turn out in large enough numbers to help Sanders on Super Tuesday and beyond. But the media’s glib conclusion on this subject — that youth voting actually declined in 2020 — was based on flawed 2016 exit polls, whose methodology changed significantly this year, rendering crude comparisons about the shape of the electorate practically worthless.

In the context of rising overall turnout, it is almost certain that the absolute number of younger primary voters actually rose in 2020. (In South Carolina, where official state numbers have been released, more than forty thousand new voters under forty-five cast a Democratic ballot, and their turnout rate increased, too.) Though outnumbered by the surge of older, richer Halliburton Democrats, these new, younger voters flocked to Bernie’s standard to an extent that helped change the geography of his coalition.

Though Sanders struggled to win many of the rural areas he had carried four years ago, his strength in cities — and especially in younger, racially diverse, lower-income urban neighborhoods — actually grew from 2016 to 2020. With younger Latino voters now firmly in his coalition, Bernie not only swept the barrios of East LA, he won overwhelming victories in the mixed, immigrant-heavy precincts of San Diego, Denver, Seattle, and Las Vegas.

Sanders showed similar strength in younger, lower-income urban areas all over the country. In the majority-nonwhite ninth ward of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, Bernie won an absolute majority. In smaller cities across the Northeast and the Midwest, his support was undiminished, if not enhanced from 2016 — with younger urban voters helping Sanders in the early states and beyond, from Portland, Maine, to Duluth, Minnesota.

Although easily dismissed by critics as a phenomenon of the “gentrifier left,” latte-swilling graduate students did not power Sanders to victory in working-class cities like Manchester, New Hampshire, or Brownsville, Texas. A much broader group of younger and disproportionately urban voters, who make far less money and own far less property than the Democratic electorate as a whole, formed the core of the Sanders coalition."

from https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/bernie-sanders-five-year-war