From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:
Time for Hillary Clinton to Worry About Winning Over Young Voters
Democrats always have a big advantage among young voters, right? That supposition at the heart of this Los Angeles Times story about her get-out-the-vote efforts among this demographic:
It’s a broad, multi-faceted effort ramping up this week intended to boost Clinton’s numbers among voters ages 18 to 35. Polls show her leading Republican candidate Donald Trump among millennials, but there is uncertainty about whether they will turn out in large enough numbers to secure victory in key battleground states.
But are we certain this demographic is one of Hillary Clinton’s strengths? Check out the Quinnipiac poll. Jill Stein is a nonentity among every age group older than 35 percent – 3 percent here, 1 percent there, 2 percent over there. But for voters from 18 to 34, Stein gets 15 percent. While Clinton is technically “winning” this demographic, she’s at 31 percent, just two points ahead of Gary Johnson. And her margin isn’t that much ahead of Trump’s 26 percent.
The 2012 exit polls showed Obama winning voters from age 18 to 29 by a huge 60-36 percent margin over Romney. A weak performance among young voters matters a great deal for a Democratic candidate, because Republican candidates tend to win among both older working voters (45 to 65) and among voters 65 and older.
Harry Enten writes that Hillary Clinton is, at least for now, leaving a lot of votes on the table:
New SurveyMonkey data (shared with FiveThirtyEight) suggests that Clinton is winning under-25 voters by half as much as Obama did. And, moreover, the data suggests that these voters should be solidly Democratic.
Unlike many other pollsters, SurveyMonkey interviews thousands and thousands of people each week, so they’re able to get a good sample of young voters. From Aug. 22 to 28, SurveyMonkey interviewed about 1,200 registered voters ages 18 to 24. Among them, Clinton led Donald Trump 41 percent to 27 percent, with 17 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson and 10 percent for the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
But will Johnson and Stein really have that level of support on Election Day? Our Dan McLaughlin notes a big question for pollsters this cycle is “whether pollsters should be including Gary Johnson and Jill Stein — third party candidates historically tend to underperform their polls unless they reach a critical mass of support, and Stein at last check is still 8 states short of being on all 50 states’ ballots.”
Allahpundit wonders if the current numbers for Johnson and Stein are illusory:
Young adults really don’t like Trump, it seems, but they’re sufficiently ambivalent about Clinton to be holding on out her right now in great numbers. The good news for Trump is that there’s no sign yet of any dam-break in Johnson’s support nationally, which means he’s still hoarding those young adults from Clinton. The bad news is that that might change in November if the election looks close. If Johnson’s young voters head for the lifeboats, they’re probably going to paddle towards Clinton. Consider all of this further evidence of why Obama is on the stump today and will be back on the stump repeatedly over the next two months. If Hillary can’t convince young voters to re-create the Obama coalition for her, maybe he can.
Except… how many times in the past eight years have we seen Obama try to get his voters out for some other Democrat when he wasn’t on the ballot – Jon Corzine, Creigh Deeds, House and Senate Democrats in the 2010 midterms, House and Senate Democrats in the 2014 midterms – to no avail? Is it that the Obama coalition only comes out to vote when it’s a presidential year? Or does the Obama coalition only comes out to vote when Obama is on the ballot?
Or if you’re a Johnson or Stein voter frustrated by the two choices… do you just stay home?