Former chair of the Democratic National Convention Howard Dean campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the Talley Student Union on Wednesday discussing his prospects for the Democratic Party platform following the 2016 election season.

Seven students attended the discussion, including Matthew Traeger, a junior studying political science. As Traeger lived in Australia until the past year, he is unable to vote in the election but still participated in the discussion.

“Back home, I studied law and politics,” Traeger said. “I’ve always been fascinated by politics, so I’ve followed the election very closely.”

Traeger described Dean as a prominent figure in the Democratic Party given Dean’s influential presidential campaign.

“Dean was like the original Bernie Sanders,” Traeger said. “In 2004, he ran as an insurgent [presidential candidate], he ran as the voice of the left of the party, of the mainstream candidates. In many ways, he set the precedent that has been followed up until today. I think being out of office gives [Dean] so much freedom to be more honest in your analysis of the political system.”

In addition to being a presidential candidate, Dean was governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2000 and was chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009.

Because of Dean’s meager audience, he put aside his Clinton endorsement for the majority of his presentation in favor of a discussion about the tendencies of the Democratic Party legislators in the present. He noted an increasing need for collaboration between the right and left in the  legislative branch.

“When I was having an issue with democrats on too much spending, I would go to make a deal with the republicans, and when I was having an issue with republicans on some environmental issue or a rights issue I would go to make a deal with the democrats,” Dean said. “It was fine, and I used them as leverage against each other.”

Dean also allowed students to ask questions to guide his presentation. A primary concern that students held coming into the discussion and 2016 election was gerrymandering and politicians manipulating polling regulations to change election results.

“We have to get rid of the idea of politicians drawing their own districts,” Dean said. “the legislature will never pass a bill like this. There’s one part that’s more important than the democrats and republicans, and that’s incumbents.”

Dean drew on an example from the California state elections six years ago to demonstrate his point.

“In 2010 the California legislature was dominated by Democrats and made a deal so that no [representative] would lose their seat,” Dean said. “Republicans were perfectly willing to sign off as a minority because they individually kept their seats. Not one state district changed hands.”

Dean proposed that citizens enact referendums to stop gerrymandering in elections. According to Dean, Californians have succeeded in reducing the amount of gerrymandering in their state elections through the method.

Dean followed his presentation with a commentary on young adults between 18 and 26 years old and the differences in political approaches between them and their parents. Young political activists appear more pragmatic in political thought, slowly drifting away from achieving party caveats such as LGBT rights or lower gun regulation, according to Dean. Dean also inferred that young adults tend to favor bipartisan collaboration to solve pressing issues such as infrastructure repairs.

“[Young adults] have passed through the cultural revolution and [ideologies] are not make or break issues for you,” Dean said. “I think that the sooner that you all get into power, what you’re interested in is finding the 80 percent of stuff that you agree upon and doing something about it.”

From that point, Dean transitioned into describing the trends in political ideology of young adults in the past ten years. Dean claimed that a growing number of young adults, particularly college students, have grown increasingly divided between libertarian economic stances and liberal social stances.

“The bad news for us is that you’re not young democrats, statistically speaking,” Dean said. “It’s a complicated question because there’s not just one democratic party. The old-line, left democratic party where government is the solution to everything is not going to survive because you guys don’t believe that government is the solution to everything as a group.”

Dean did not cite his statistics, but rather stressed changing trends in the young, previously democratic voter ideology. Clinton poses as a good candidate to appeal to such a base, according to Dean. Dean reaffirmed that Clinton has worked in gradual increments and bipartisan compromises and that she would be able to accommodate her complex, young adult base.

“Politics is really about advancing the ball a little bit,” Dean said. “You’re not going to get everything that you want. What [Clinton] is good at is working with people, including some people that [Democrats] wouldn’t like. Now that I’ve lived most of my life, I’ve realized that the wins are about long-term rather than short-term.”