Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton’s classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls when he announced on June 16 to pass the other Republican candidates a month later and now stands at 26 percent, 14 percent ahead of any other candidate.
Trump’s constituency in many ways resembles that amassed by another celebrity candidate who defied the usual political rules, Ross Perot in 1992. Like Perot, Trump runs better among whites than blacks, among men than women, among non-college graduates than college grads, in the suburbs and countryside than big cities. Like Perot, he has no special appeal to traditionally religious voters.
But there is one striking difference. In November 1992, Perot won more than 20 percent among voters under 45 but only 12 percent among those 60 and over. Younger voters, presumably less attached to parties than their elders, flocked to his side.
Trump’s appeal is strongest at the other end of the age spectrum. Recent Quinnipiac and CNN/ORC polls showed him with over 40 percent favorable ratings from voters 50 and over. But his favorable ratings among voters under 35 were only 25 and 28 percent, while 66 to 68 percent rated him unfavorably.
These young voters have had few years in which to build up party loyalty, and they have been switching around. In 2008, voters under 30 went 66 percent for Barack Obama. But the current Quinnipiac survey shows under 35s voting only an average of 51 percent for Clinton when matched against Republicans Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.
Many young people are apparently open to voting Republican — but not for Trump. For the Millennial generation, it appears, Trump is yesterday’s news.
Why should that be so? The best explanation I can come up with is that Trump’s signature issues, the issues on which he has sparked controversy — immigration and, often mentioned in the same breath, trade — are issues that have been declining in salience in recent years.
They still animate older voters, who have been paying attention for some time. But for younger voters, they’re yesterday’s news.
Consider Mexican immigration and Trump’s proposal — best taken as an opening counter in a negotiation — of forcing Mexico to somehow pay for construction of a fence on the southern border.
The fact is that net Mexican immigration since the 2007-08 economic collapse has slowed to a trickle. Data compiled by the Pew Research Center, accepted as reasonably accurate by experts on all sides of the immigration debate, show that net migration from Mexico to the United States since 2007 has been zero. The numbers of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. has declined from 6.9 million to 5.9 million.
Barely half of the country’s illegal immigrants now are from Mexico, and in 2014, for the first time, more non-Mexicans than Mexicans were apprehended on the border. More immigrants now come from China and from India than from Mexico.
Obama administration decisions to let under-18 Central Americans be dispersed around the country last year and its proposal, now blocked by a federal judge, to provide legal status not only to those brought over illegally as children but also to the parents who brought them over illegally have stirred outrage among many Republicans. But they’re not the focus of Trump’s complaints.
Trump has also not focused on proposals that could reduce the illegal immigrant population, like requiring employers to use e-Verify or, as Chris Christie reasonably advocated, using FedEx-like tracking methods to identify the nearly half of illegals who have overstayed legal visas. Trump’s focus instead is to stop a surge that is already over — yesterday’s news.
Similarly, Trump’s complaints about trade agreements, reminiscent of Perot, ignore the fact that international trade has continued to decline since 2009. Higher Chinese labor costs and the perils of long supply chains have led to onshoring — returning manufacturing jobs to the United States.
Declining international trade is of course a mixed blessing, a symptom of stagnant economies here and abroad. But “the great sucking sound” Perot decried is yesterday’s news.
Trump’s issues, still raging for older voters, don’t seem to resonate with the young. And they don’t point to a way for Republicans to appeal to the electorate of the future.
