Millennial voters are so not living up to Hillary’s campaign expectations

Millennial voters are so not living up to Hillary’s campaign expectations

Remember when millennial voters were going to help propel Hillary Clinton to near certain victory?

I was skeptical long ago. In early April 2015 (that’s 15 not 16, mind you), I wrote, Job One: Teach millennials about the real Hillary:

When discussing Hillary Clinton’s email and server scandal, I dismissed arguments that the scandal in and of itself would sink Hillary’s impending campaign.

There are far too many powerful people invested in Hillary for President to let mere paranoid and obsessive control coupled with destruction of evidence stop Hillary. In fact, to Hillary’s core supporters, paranoid and obsessive control coupled with destruction of evidence is a feature, not a bug.

Rather, I argued that the damage from Emailgate (or is it Servergate or Deletegate?) was in shaping Hillary’s image for voters who never knew the Hillary older voters know:

While it’s way too early to assess the overall damage to Hillary Incorporated from the email, now document destruction, scandal, is does appear to be hurting Team Billary in ways that are hard to change: Public perception of a politician.

While Billary is dreadfully tiresome and transparently faux in its lack of transparency, to much of the electorate Billary is simply a nice old lady with a grandchild. Well, she does have a grandchild, but that’s about where the nice ends. And that unhappy end product of a secretive, controlling, fear-mongering, basically incompetent presidential candidate is coming into public view and that view may be hard to change.

Over the last 18 months, Hillary has become known to younger voters, and they don’t like what they see.

The Atlantic reports today, Millennial Voters May Cost Hillary Clinton the Election:

In simplest terms, Clinton’s problem is that large numbers of Millennials have never warmed to her as a national candidate.

In 2008, the cumulative analysis of all exit polls conducted during the Democratic primary found that Millennial voters preferred Barack Obama over Clinton by a solid margin of 58 percent to 38 percent. Eight years later, running against Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who was virtually unknown as a national figure when the race began, Clinton lost Millennials even more resoundingly, 71 percent to 28 percent, according to a cumulative analysis of exit poll results by the ABC pollster Gary Langer. Sanders beat Clinton among Millennials in all of the 27 Democratic primary and caucus states with exit polls this year, except Mississippi and Alabama. Even in states she won comfortably, like New York and Pennsylvania, Sanders beat her by two-to-one or more among the youngest voters.

The skepticism has persisted into the general election. Virtually all national and state surveys show Clinton leading Trump among Millennial voters. But the same polls show her falling well short of Obama’s showing among them, according to exit polls, in 2008 (67 percent) or 2012 (60 percent). Even more important, they show her failing to consolidate the enormous share of Millennials who express unfavorable views about Trump. Instead, many of those voters now say they will support libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

In almost every recent poll there’s a huge fall off between the share of Millennials who express disdain for Trump and the percentage who support Clinton. That’s one key reason the overall race remains so close.

Hillary’s health incident at the 9/11 Memorial likely solidified the perception that Hillary is irrelevant to millennials. The Atlantic continues:

But the message from all of these polls is that Clinton’s problems with younger voters are rooted not in policy but in personal assessments. Big majorities of Millennials, the polls show, view her as untrustworthy, calculating, and unprincipled. Which is another way of saying they have accepted the portrait that Bernie Sanders painted of her during their long primary struggle. In the GWU Battleground Poll, 66 percent of Millennials said she says what is politically convenient, while only 22 percent said she says what she believes. In the Quinnipiac survey, 77 percent said she was not honest and trustworthy. “It’s hard for them after hearing that for a year [from Sanders] to just turn on a dime,” Baumann says.

So the only thing Hillary and her media supporters have left is to attack Trump. It’s hard to see how that will help Hillary with millennials, who already have no love for Trump.

At some point Team Hillary has to deal with the reality of an unlikable candidate.

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