PHILADELPHIA — Selling President Obama’s message is easier than winning on his legacy.
That’s what Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is finding out as she scrambles to boost her support among younger voters and blunt Donald Trump’s September momentum.
Lukewarm backing for Clinton among millennials, a key voting bloc that turned out in big numbers for Obama four years ago, is among the reasons the Republican nominee has caught her in public opinion polls.
Younger voters haven’t abandoned Clinton for Trump. Rather, they’re showing interest in third party candidates — or could sit the election out because they don’t like their choices.
Nicole Brigstock, 19, isn’t one of those disaffected millennials.
She believes Clinton would make a great president, and was so excited about the Democrat that she showed up at Temple University on Monday just for a chance to see the former secretary of state in person for the first time.
But Brigstock understands why voters are less enthusiastic about Clinton than they were about Obama.
“Obama and his entire campaign did a really good job of sending messages, like hope and inspirational messages,” she said. “Whereas, Hillary’s campaign was sort of, I would say, a little bit less progressive in the sense that there weren’t so many new ideas and revolutionary aspects to it. It was just sort of, we’re going to continue what Obama started and not let his legacy go to waste.”
Philip Mattes, a 19 year-old Temple student, also was in the crowd for Clinton’s millennial-focused speech.
He liked what he heard and expressed confidence that Clinton’s millennial outreach would get results. But, like Brigstock, Mattes conceded that turning them out to vote isn’t going to be easy.
“The main issues with the voting level at my generation is kind of something beyond the candidate’s issue,” he said. “There is a just a big sense of voter [apathy] that they don’t think a candidate can really change anything. They also want to break away from the two party system.”
Clinton’s problem with millennials was evident in the George Washington University Battleground Poll.
The survey, conducted by a Republican and Democratic pollster showed that these voters hold a low opinion of Trump and trust Clinton more than him on key issues.
Yet in a four-way ballot test, which will be available to voters in several though not all states, Clinton’s share of the millennial vote was just 46 percent, followed by 26 percent for Trump, 18 percent for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and 5 percent for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
As Ronald Brownstein noted in an analysis for The Atlantic, Obama won 60 percent of Millenials in 2012, according to exit polls.
In Philadelphia on Monday, where Clinton delivered a 30-minute speech focused directly on boosting her support among young voters, some of her supporters speculated that the nominee is lagging because of holdouts who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic primary.
Temple student Mike McDermott, 20, was one of them. He eventually came around and now describes himself as fired up about Clinton. But he acknowledged there are Sanders supporters that haven’t made the transition.
“There were so many people that were so passionate about Bernie and once we lost that — I voted for Bernie too, I was a huge Bernie supporter. I lot of people still haven’t gotten around to accepting that,” McDermott said. “I’m sure that as time goes on, they’ll become more firmly in the Hillary camp — they’ll realize that we can’t have Donald Trump as president.”
The Clinton campaign recognizes the risk this poses and is working overtime to fix it.
Last Thursday, Clinton spoke to students and supporters on the campus of the University of North Carolina Greensboro. That appearance marked her first campaign stop following a five-day absence from the trail to recover from pneumonia.
On Monday, for Clinton’s second event, she traveled to Temple University to launch a more concerted effort to win over millennials. Sometimes criticized as a canned politician, Clinton was blunt during her remarks to a few hundred students and other supporters gathered there.
“I know that with Washington paralyzed by big money and partisanship, the gap between the change we want and the progress that politics should deliver can look like a chasm,” she said. “I also know that even if you’re totally opposed to Donald Trump, you may still have some questions about me. I get that. And I want to do my best to answer those questions.”
“We need everyone off the sidelines; not voting is not an option,” Clinton said. That just plays into Trump’s hands — it does,” Clinton added.
Clinton is in a dogfight with Trump with 50 days to go after leading big for most of the summer
Public opinion polls over the past 10 days have shown more enthusiasm among Republicans, such that more GOP voters are considered likely to vote in November than Democrats in some surveys. That has contributed significantly to Trump’s rise.
Clinton can solve that problem by recreating Obama’s 2012 coalition, and capitalizing on the Democratic Party’s natural demographic advantage in presidential elections — when their voters tun out. Upping her support among skeptical millennials is a part of that.
Clinton’s Monday speech was a textbook example of how to reach younger voters in 2016 — at least according to the half-dozen or so interviewed by the Washington Examiner before and after her address:
Clinton drew connections to Obama and Sanders, still vastly more popular among many of these Americans than she is; she spent considerable time detailing her agenda, including a focus on the prioritized issues of jobs, climate change and student debt; and she warned of the “dangers” of a Trump presidency.
Indeed, although the narrative about young voters is usually that they are turned off by negative campaigning, the young voters committed to Clinton who were in the audience for her Temple University speech said it was important for her to highlight Trump’s flaws as a part of her message to millennials.
For now, those that don’t need convincing, like Temple student Aviv Reif, 18, are expressing confidence that their peers will come around, especially if the Democratic nominee continues her outreach. But in the back of their minds, perhaps, anxiety is lurking.
“The skepticism towards Clinton and the failure to vote, that’s just a symptom of the overall problem that the American government really has failed to solve a lot of these ongoing issues for the last decade or so,” Reif said.
