As Election Day draws closer, young voters are beginning to accept their fate and declare their support for Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, support for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is beginning to flame out. While his campaign has been bolstered by millennials, the new Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows nearly 40 percent of his young supporters are “likely” to change their minds at the polls.
Clinton, on the other hand, has made gains with young voters in recent weeks. The Harvard IOP has her up 28 points among 18- to 29-year-olds (49 percent to Donald Trump’s 21 percent). Johnson has 14 percent and Green Party nominee Jill Stein has 5 percent.
Clinton’s longtime struggle to connect with young adults led many to defect to third-party candidates or remain in the undecided column earlier in the campaign, however recent polls, including the new GenForward survey, show her numbers have improved in October and she’s on track to win a similar percentage of young voters as President Obama in 2012.
According to the Harvard IOP, 72 percent of Clinton’s young supporters said they are “enthusiastic” about voting for her in November, and 94 percent said they are unlikely to change their minds between now and Election Day.
Sixty-five percent of young Trump supporters said they were enthusiastic about their candidate, and his supporters are similarly loyal: 95 percent said they weren’t likely to change their minds.
Johnson has the least enthusiastic supporters. Fifty-eight percent said they were excited to cast a ballot for him and 37 percent admitted that they were likely to change their minds at the polls.
Harvard IOP polling director John Della Volpe speculated that Johnson’s “Aleppo moment,” the memorable gaffe on MSNBC in which the former governor couldn’t identify the important Syrian city, could have hurt him. The subsequent misstep when Johnson failed to come up with the name of any foreign leader he admired contributed to the appearance that he lacks foreign policy knowledge.
It’s also possible that Johnson’s supporters are unenthused because they see him as a “protest” vote, and are supporting him simply because his name isn’t Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
In the national polls, Johnson has dropped from the low double-digits down to 6 percent in recent weeks. Support for the Libertarian candidate is falling, and while millennials support Johnson more than any other age group, there’s no telling how many will follow through and vote for him on November 8.
