One in four millennials would rather have the Earth destroyed by a giant meteor than send either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump to the White House, according to a new poll.
UMass Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion joined with Odyssey Millennials to conduct the poll. Joshua Dyck, a co-director of UMass Lowell’s group, said the irreverent question was designed to get a sense of young Americans’ unhappiness about the candidate choices in the upcoming Nov. 8 election.
Twenty-three percent said all major party options are less preferable than the annihilation of all life on earth by a cataclysmic collision with an object from space, but participants seemed to see a Clinton administration as a bit less threatening of a doomsday scenario than her Trump.
Fifty-three percent of poll participants said they would rather go the way of the dinosaurs than have the Republican presidential nominee win the election. Thirty-four percent said they preferred being engulfed in an apocalyptic inferno over seeing Hillary Clinton sit in the Oval Office.
Nearly 40 percent said they would support President Obama declaring himself president for life over giving up the office to make space for either Clinton or Trump. Twenty-six percent said a random lottery would be a better way to choose the next president.
The question reflects Twitter hashtag #GiantMeteor2016, used to refer to a fictitious planet-destroying presidential candidate supported by many who believe the political landscape is as barren as the lunar surface.
“Obviously we don’t think that they’re serious,” Dyck told Reuters Tuesday. “The fact that one in four of our young people pick ‘Giant Meteor’ tells you something about the political disaffection that is being shown by American youth.”
Sweet Meteor O’Death echoed some of Trump’s claims about the legitimacy of polls by questioning the researchers’ methodology.
The pollsters deliberately included a large chunk of young people unlikely to vote and just 680 were listed as likely voters.
The poll of 1,247 people aged 18-35 was conducted Oct. 10-13 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percent.
