Conservatives don’t represent the majority view, but they’ve nonetheless managed to tip things in their favor by cheating and playing dirty and blocking fair procedure. The four horseman of the apocalypse — gerrymandering, using all kinds of nefarious tactics to keep people of color from voting, dark money and the rank misrepresentations of the electoral college.

But right-wingers’ biggest ace in the hole — the factor that helps them more than any other dishonest, underhanded maneuver in their playbook — is the young person who refuses to vote.

If younger Texas voters got on the stick Beto O’Rourke would almost certainly beat Ted Cruz, but Texas leads the nation in disaffected voters. Right now the polls seem to indicate that Cruz will prevail, and there’s one reason for this — the refusal of young voters to step up to the plate.

Aside from murder and child molesting there is no human behavior more reprehensible than refusing to take an hour or two out of a single day to vote for the best person or, failing that, the lesser of two evils. Imagine all those hundreds of thousands who could’ve held their noses and voted for the deeply unattractive, heavily compromised Hillary Clinton, which would have saved us from Donald Trump. But they couldn’t be bothered. The general understanding is that young people are too pure to vote. They have an asinine view that candidates aren’t worth voting for unless they’re truly inspirational and unfettered. They make me sick with rage.

HE to under-30 assholes: “The responsibility of a country is not in the hands of a privileged few. We are strong and we are free from tyranny as long as each one of us remembers his or her duty as a citizen. Whether it’s to report a pothole at the top of your street, or lies in a State of The Union Address, speak out! Ask those questions. Demand that truth. Democracy is not a free ride man, I’m here to tell you. But this is where we live. And if we do our job, this is where our children will live.”