Are Millennials sour on this year’s Democratic presidential candidates? Evidence from the recent nationwide Quinnipiac poll conducted August 20-25 suggests the answer is yes, at least compared to how they responded to Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008 and 2012. Quinnipiac paired three Republican candidates — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump — against three Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders.
Among millennials, voters 18-29, the three Democrats led each of the three Republicans by between eight-21 points. Obama carried millennials by 34 points in 2008 and 23 points in 2012.
The really relevant result, however, is that none of the Democrats, not even the universally known Hillary Clinton, come close to matching Obama’s percentage of the millennial vote, while the Republicans, all lesser known at this point, are within the margin of error of John McCain’s percentage in 2008 and come fairly close to Mitt Romney’s somewhat higher millennial percentage in 2012. The following table shows the results of the 2008 and 2012 exit polls among Millennials and the Quinnipiac results for each of the pairings.
Obama-McCain 66-32
Obama-Romney 60-37
Clinton-Bush 49-30
Clinton-Rubio 51-34
Clinton-Trump 53-32
Biden-Bush 48-35
Biden-Rubio 45-37
Biden-Trump 53-32
Sanders-Bush 48-33
Sanders-Rubio 45-36
Sanders-Trump 50-29
Thus Clinton averages 51 percent against the three Republicans, Biden averages 49 percent and the presumably much less well known Sanders is not significantly far behind, averaging 48 percent. This indicates basic Democratic strength significantly below Obama’s 2012 level of 60 percent and far behind his 2008 figure of 66 percent.
Among the three Republicans, Bush averages 33 percent against the three Democrats, Rubio averages a slightly better 35 percent and Trump a slightly weaker 31 percent. This compares to McCain’s 32 percent and is not far below Romney’s 37 percent. So despite being less well known than two of the three Democrats, the three Republicans come close to matching previous Republican performances among millennials.
Now it is true that the millennials of 2008 or 2012 are not the same people as the millennials of 2015. Some of the earlier millennials have, willingly or not, graduated into the 35-49 age group. And a number of polls have shown that young millennials, whose adult experience has come entirely in the Obama years, are less inclined to vote Democratic than older millennials, whose adult experiences were shaped during George W. Bush’s presidency.
That said, if Democrats cannot win significantly more than 50 percent support from 2016 millennials, they will be hard-pressed to win the presidency. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if Obama had won only about 51 percent of millennials’ votes in 2012 rather than the 60 percent he did win, he would have lost the following states to Mitt Romney: Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Those states have 99 electoral votes, and so without them Obama’s electoral vote count would have been reduced from 332 to 233, well below the 270 required to win.
That certainly doesn’t mean that the 2016 Democratic nominee is doomed to lose. She or he could certainly end up winning more than 51 percent of millennials, or increasing the Democratic share of other age groups above what Obama won in 2012. But there’s not a lot of margin of error, since Obama’s national percentage was 51 percent. That’s the same as George W. Bush’s percentage in 2004, and you know what happened to Republicans in the next presidential election.
I think it justifies veteran analyst Charlie Cook’s estimate that Democrats are ahead in states with 217 electoral votes and Republicans are ahead in states with 206 electoral votes. In other words, neither party seems to have a significant advantage at this point.
