Sunday, August 7, 2016

Poll: If this election were held among Millennials, Trump would be a "third party candidate"

I saw a new poll come out with some fairly interesting results. It's only one poll, but as the article mentions they've found similar results elsewhere. Long story short, Trump polls horribly among Millennials. Here's the full breakdown of the votes:

Hillary Clinton- 41%

Gary Johnson- 23%

Jill Stein- 16%

Donald Trump- 9%

That's pretty sad. To be fair, it's only one poll, but even then, other polls found Johnson and Trump splitting the conservative vote pretty evenly. Long story short, the republican party as it exists is unsustainable and on borrowed time. Its current form is mostly fueled by older voters, and in a few decades it's going to have to become a lot more libertarian.

As for the democrats, while 41% for Clinton shows that democrats are popular among millennials, we all know that in the primary that Millennials heavily favored Bernie Sanders. A significant group also split off and supports Stein. I'm pretty sure most of these guys are former Sanders supporters too. I think in the long term, the democratic party will end up looking much more progressive. Clinton may win this round, but unless she fundamentally changes how they think and makes them fall in line, the future is going to look better than the present.

This is what the party realignment in the upcoming years will look like, generally speaking. Republicans will become more libertarian, democrats will become more progressive. I'd imagine the current democratic party will represent the center of tomorrow's political battlegrounds. This is going to happen unless the next few years change millennials' minds significantly, or unless the process of growing older makes them more conservative like some people think it will. It really shows how our current politics are out of sync with what the younger generations (like myself) think. Trump and Clinton are boomer/gen x candidates. They represent their views. They don't represent younger people. Among our voters, Trump is de facto third party status and we see libertarians becoming a much larger faction on the right, with the left being far more progressive.

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