Donald Trump, the petty, vindictive real estate heir who has become the Republican nomination thanks to a combination of insults and a promise to build a big wall, is having a pretty good week. Last Friday he was endorsed by the NRA, on Thursday he officially clinched the Republican nomination, then Fox News aired a documentary on his family that was praised as "like something you'd see on state-run television somewhere."
To top it off, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll showed him with an edge over Hillary Clinton in the general election—an edge earned at least in part by a sudden surge in his popularity among millennials. The survey reports a pretty major jump in the way young people view Trump: In March, Clinton had a 64–25 lead among registered voters under 30, but as of May that gap had been narrowed to 45–42. Her support dropped across all demographics in the new poll, but the fact that a huge number of twentysomethings were suddenly siding with the GOP was the big news.
Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among young voters 67–30 in 2012, and conventional wisdom is that millennials can't stand the Republican Party, particularly when it comes to social issues. So, what the fuck? Are young people actually turning to Trump?
The right-wing blogosphere certainly thinks so. The white supremacists at the Daily Stormer (trigger warning on that link right there) hailed the poll as a sign that "liberal SJWism can, one, win them over for himself, or, two, make them stay home."
A Friday Associated Press piece on young people who support Trump offered some competing theories. Author Morley Winograd told the AP that millennials may be thinking,"'The system is rigged, I need somebody to totally overthrow the system' and that's what Trump says he's going to do and that's what Sanders says he's going to do." The idea is that the current generation is deeply distrustful of the system that brought us the financial crisis, a crumbling infrastructure, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—anyone who says they're going to shake that system up is going to have at least some appeal, whether they come from the left or the right. The AP quoted several twentysomethings who say that their decision isn't between Trump and Clinton, it's between Trump and Sanders.
If Trump's support is actually just dislike for Clinton, it's possible to chalk some of the ABC poll result up to an increasingly heated Democratic primary. A Harvard poll in April found that millennials overwhelmingly hated Trump—the problem is just that they don't like Clinton that much either. A Public Policy Polling survey from this month said that voters undecided between Clinton and Trump backed Sanders by a 41–8 margin.
If Sanders eventually falls short and endorses Clinton, as nearly everyone expects, some of his passionate young supporters will likely come around to the view of, Oh yeah, Trump really is that bad. (The question of how many Sanders fans wouldn't cast a Clinton ballot is hotly debated, but polls show that most of them would vote for the former secretary of state against the real estate mogul.)
Still, the ABC poll is something of an outlier. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll also released this week had Clinton leading Trump among young people 55–32, even as Trump's overall numbers rose; a CBS/New York Times poll from earlier this month had the gap at 47–34.
Not that those numbers are where Clinton wants to be—if she wants to maintain the "Obama coalition" that won the last two presidential elections for Democrats, she needs young people in her camp, and she needs them in large numbers. Convincing Sanders to stump for her (along with Obama himself) will probably help, as will highlighting some of her millennial-specific policy proposals, like letting people refinance their student loans. (Trump's proposal on student debt, by contrast, is incredibly vague, like most of his campaign platform.)
The silver lining for Clinton is that though many young people aren't as excited about her as they are about Sanders, the argument that they should do everything they can to stop the thin-skinned, secretive, ignorant Trump is a fairly good one. Trump is going to spend this campaign raising questions about Clinton's future—Clinton's task is going to be asking millennials if they really want their future to be guided by Trump.
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