The largest voting bloc — millennials — is one with historically low voter turnouts, and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won’t attract them to the voting booths. Neither of the candidates have much appeal with millennials, and it’s too late to earn it, Natalie Sportelli suggests for Forbes.
There’s an issue of “authenticity,” which explains why Bernie Sanders has a commanding lead with young voters from state exit polls and nationally. The character trait is one which “both of the front-runners woefully lack,” and it’s too late for Hillary and Trump to change that.
“As far as the authenticity perspective,” Lisa Walden, a generational expert at BridgeWorks warns, “there’s fairly little [Trump and Clinton] can do at this point.”
The candidates already have their personas. With November only a few months away, Walden thinks “voters will make decisions based on what they’ve already seen.” There likely isn’t “anything that happens moving forward will have a huge impact” because “their minds are already made up.”
A millennial desire for community has also turned them off to this election. “Talking about things in a communal sense would be good for either party rather than pointing fingers and blaming certain groups. It would help them if they focused on communal language and spoke in a positive tone,” Walden said.
Hillary would win the youth vote if Walden is correct that millennials won’t change their minds.
But, as Sportelli noted, the demographic might abstain from voting “either as a statement or because they can’t put their support behind any one candidate.” In that case, the larger challenge “may become getting them to vote at all.”
The point is one which has been made before, with some suggesting it could endanger Hillary’s chances for an easy win. It could hand Trump the presidency. The point has been made by liberal and conservative commentators, as well as political science professors. Whether candidates actually succeed in courting them, millennials voting patterns (or lack thereof) could still decide the election.
