Hillary Clinton’s Millennial Problem

That’s just some of the latest news to suggest Clinton has a greater challenge winning the Democratic nomination than previously thought. But if the former secretary of state can get through her primary, there’s reason to believe she won’t have an easier time with Millennials in the general election.

That’s the conclusion of a new study conducted by Evolving Strategies, a consulting firm that employs an experimental approach to evaluating the effectiveness of political advertising. In a recent trial with more than 1,000 respondents aged 18 to 34, Evolving Strategies found Millennials switched their support away from Clinton when presented with a negative ad about her response to the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Here’s how the experiment worked: The pool of Millennials were divided into two groups: One, a control group, watched a non-political advertisement, while the other watched this attack ad from Stop Hillary PAC:

Both groups were then asked to say whom they would support in each general election match-up between Hillary Clinton and three possible GOP opponents: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Their answers were forced choices—that is, respondents had to pick either Clinton or the GOP challenger—and the Republican match-ups were asked in random order.

Here’s the percentage of support each Republican candidate got in both the control and attack groups, and the positive impact the attack had on the Republican’s performance:

Not surprisingly, each Republican candidate did better against Clinton among the Millennials who had seen the attack ad against her. But the impact of the ad was different for each Republican. Rubio polled the best among Millennials in both groups, and among the attack-ad group, his support even bumped up above 50 percent. Cruz did slightly worse than Rubio but received an even bigger bounce—8 percentage points—from the attack ad.

Trump, clearly, performed the worst among Millennials, getting just a 5-point bounce and 40 percent support among those who saw the anti-Hillary ad on Benghazi. But even if Trump were the nominee and kept those numbers, it would be better than the 36 percent support Mitt Romney received from 18- to 29-year-olds, according to exit polls.

There are some starker differences among the Republican candidates, and a surprise or two, when looking strictly at Millennial women in this study. Here’s a similar chart, this time among those respondents who were women:

Rubio still edges Cruz out among both groups of women, while Cruz also has a slightly bigger bounce from those who saw the attack ad. But the impact of the ad is noticeably larger among those two candidates, into double-digits. Millennial women in the control group are noticeably more pro-Clinton than Millennials in general, but those who see the attack ad support Cruz at the same levels as the group as a whole 46 percent) and support Rubio at nearly the same level (50 percent compared to 51 percent for all Millennials who saw the attack ad).

But Trump appears to have limited appeal among Millennial women, at least with regard to the Benghazi issue. His support is 32 percent among the controlled group and bumps up just 2 points to 34 percent among the attack-ad group. There could be a good line of attack for Republicans to take against Clinton if Trump is the nominee, but Benghazi isn’t one of them, at least not with young women voters.

What to learn from this? Millennials appear to be somewhat persuadable by questions about Clinton’s response to the terrorist attack, and much less so with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. How this would play out in the real world, with attack ads flying left and right from both sides, is unpredictable. But it also suggests Benghazi as a political issue has more potency—even among the youngest voters—than the mainstream media might generally assume.