Exclusive: Democrats lose ground with millennials -
Reuters/Ipsos poll, by Chris Kahn, 4/30/18
MANCHESTER, N.H. (Reuters) - Enthusiasm
for the Democratic Party is waning among millennials as its candidates head
into the crucial midterm congressional elections, according to the
Reuters/Ipsos national opinion poll.
The online survey of more than 16,000
registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over
Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two
years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is
a better steward of the economy.
Although nearly two of three young
voters polled said they do not like Republican President Donald Trump, their
distaste for him does not necessarily extend to all Republicans or translate
directly into votes for Democratic congressional candidates.
That presents a potential problem for
Democrats who have come to count on millennials as a core constituency - and
will need all the loyalty they can get to achieve a net gain of 23 seats to
capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November.
Young voters represent an opportunity
and a risk for both parties, said Donald Green, a political science professor
at Columbia University in New York City.
“They’re not as wedded to one party,”
Green said. “They’re easier to convince than, say, your 50- or 60-year-olds who
don’t really change their minds very often.”
Terry Hood, 34, an African-American who
works at a Dollar General store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and took this year’s
poll, said he voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential
election.
But he will consider a Republican for
Congress because he believes the party is making it easier to find jobs and he
applauds the recent Republican-led tax cut.
“It sounds strange to me to say this
about the Republicans, but they’re helping with even the small things,” Hood
said in a phone interview. “They’re taking less taxes out of my
paycheck. I notice that.”
The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed young
voters during the first three months of this year and the same period in 2016.
Only 28 percent of those polled
expressed overt support for Republicans in the 2018 poll - about the same
percentage as two years earlier.
But that does not mean the rest will
turn out to back Democrats, the survey showed. A growing share of voters
between ages 18 and 34 years old said they were undecided, would support a
third-party candidate or not vote at all.
The shift away from Democrats was more
pronounced among white millennials - who accounted for two-thirds of all votes
cast in that age group in 2016.
Two years ago, young white people
favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress by a margin of 47 to 33
percent; that gap vanished by this year, with 39 percent supporting each party.
The shift was especially dramatic among
young white men, who two years ago favored Democrats but now say they favor
Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 46 to 37 percent, the Reuters/Ipsos poll
showed.
Ashley Reed, a white single mother of
three in New Hampshire, said a teenage fascination with Democrat Barack Obama
led her to support his presidency in 2008.
But her politics evolved with her
personal life. Reed, now 28, grew more supportive of gun rights, for instance,
while married to her now ex-husband, a U.S. Navy technician.
She lost faith in social welfare
programs she came to believe were misused. She opposed abortion after having
children.
Reed plans to vote for a Republican for
Congress this year.
“As I got older, I felt that I could be
my own voice,” she said last month in Concord, New Hampshire.
Down the road from where Reed lives lies
New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, a hiker’s paradise of evergreen thickets
and snow-capped lakes where young white voters make up about a quarter of the
electorate, compared to 21 percent nationally.
The district’s House seat has changed
parties five times in seven election cycles and is up for grabs this year after
the Democratic incumbent declined to seek re-election.
New Hampshire’s Democrats have an early
edge in voter enthusiasm after a string of victories in races for state
legislative seats, said Christopher Galdieri, a politics professor at Saint
Anselm College in Manchester.
At a campaign event at the University of
New Hampshire in Durham, Mindi Messmer, one of eight Democrats running in the
primary election, touted her work as an environmental crusader. But students in
the crowd also raised many other issues, notably the local economy.
“People come to school here, and then
they move away because they can’t get jobs,” said Acadia Spear, 18, of
Portsmouth.
Spear said she would likely vote for a
Democrat, but her peers nationally are increasingly looking to Republicans for
economic leadership, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Millennials are almost evenly split this
year over the question of which party has a better plan for the economy, with
34 percent picking the Democrats and 32 percent choosing Republicans. That’s a
shift from two years ago, when they said Democrats had the better plan by a
12-point margin.
In Manchester, the biggest city in New
Hampshire’s 1st District, tattoo artist Ashley Matthias, 31, said she has not
decided how she will vote but will support anyone who will make her health
insurance more affordable.
As she drilled an eagle in black ink
across a client’s shoulder blades, Matthias explained that it is cheaper to pay
for her doctor’s visits out-of-pocket than to buy insurance through the
government-run Obamacare exchange. “You just hope nothing happens to
you,” she said.
After the bruising loss in the
presidential election of 2016, the Democratic Party learned it needed to reach
young voters on their turf, including on social media and at college campuses,
said Elizabeth Renda, who specializes in reaching young voters for the
Democratic National Committee.“Instead of having real conversations with them,
we settled for TV ads,” Renda said of the 2016 failure.
Earlier this year, the DNC launched its
“IWillVote” initiative, aimed in part at registering millennials to vote. The
party also will run ads via social media and text, and it plans to send buses
to college campuses on election day to bring students to the polls.
The Democratic National Committee
declined to comment on the Reuters poll. Republican National Committee
spokeswoman Cassie Smedile said the poll indicates that young voters “like what
they’ve seen” from the party in power.
The Republican committee plans to target
young voters in part through a pilot program to get out the vote at six college
campuses, Smedile said.
In New Hampshire, Eddie Edwards, one of
two Republicans running for Congress in the 1st District, said he pitches
millennials on ways the government should help college graduates pay off their
student loans. He also argues that public secondary schools must better prepare
students to find jobs without attending college.
“This is a generation that has much more
access to information than others,” he said. “Unless you’re addressing those
issues that are important to them, it’s hard to get them involved.”
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted
online in English throughout the United States. It gathered about 65,000
responses in all during the first three months of 2018 and 2016, including
16,000 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 34 and nearly 11,000
registered white millennial voters.
The poll has a credibility interval of 1
percentage point, meaning that results may vary by about 1 percentage point in
either direction. For graphic on Democrats losing millenial voters,
click: tmsnrt.rs/2I1YafW
Reporting by Chris Kahn;
Additional reporting by Grant Smith in New York; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and
Brian Thevenot
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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