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Trump's Racist Fear-Mongering Is Resonating with Young White Voters

A new survey of millennials shows that young white voters are split between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. And while most young voters of color support Clinton, she still needs to work for their votes.
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They say the kids are our future. In that spirit, every month since June, the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago has been surveying a nationally representative panel of almost 2,000 18- to 30-year-olds to get the youth's take on the 2016 presidential election and the issues surrounding it, putting an emphasis on representing minorities who are often left out or underrepresented in public polling. The good news is that the GenForward survey proves that millennials aren't just a bunch of nihilists who only care about memes. The bad news is that it found white millennial voters have a starkly different view of America than young blacks, Latinos, and Asians.

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Not surprisingly, overall, black, Latino, and Asian voters said they view Hilary Clinton more favorably than the guy who promoted stop-and-frisk policing as a strategy for mitigating police killings of black men. Support for Donald Trump among the black participants was in the single digits. (It was literally one percent!) But among young white voters, a different picture emerged: According to the survey, white millennials are essentially split between Clinton and Trump: Both candidates respectively had 27 percent support among the demographic. And on a number of policies, a sizable faction of the white participants either thinks that Donald Trump would be the best candidate for the job or that neither candidate is a good option. For example, the majority of minorities reported that they felt Clinton would better handle job creation. Conversely, 47 percent of whites surveyed said they had faith in Donald Trump. (27 percent said Clinton, and 15 percent said neither.)

Read more: Some Absolute Garbage Ideas by Vice Presidential Nominee Mike Pence

The same pattern played out when the participants were asked which candidate would "better handle your personal financial situation." But when asked who would best tackle income inequality and increasing wages, the majority of all respondents went with Hilary, probably because those are two issues that Trump hasn't really addressed. (Not to mention that he plans to reduce already historically low taxes on the wealthy.)

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There are a number of explanations for this racial divide. Cathy Cohen, the study's lead author, says that it could simply be because far fewer black voters support the Republican party. She also mentions that the sheer lack of support for Trump (except for that one guy) definitely has something to do with the Republican candidate being so awful.

"The Black Youth Project has looked at young voters, in terms of their policies, for a very long time," Cohen explains over the phone. "I don't think we've ever seen this low of support for the Republican candidate [among young black voters]."

As for the white millennials being evenly divided among the two candidates, Cohen says that this is typical. It's surprising to me that Trump, given what Trump is, holds as much weight as Hilary among young white voters, but Cohen says this indicates that both candidates have a white millennial problem. "For some people who are looking to the Obama coalition of 2008, where the majority of white voters supported his campaign, they expected to see a majority of young whites supporting Hilary Clinton. But in 2012, 51 percent of young white voters voted for Mitt Romney. Donald Trump hasn't secured any where near that level of support, so he also has a millennial vote problem."

The survey also carried out a general thermometer read of how student debt-saddled, never-retiring-and-never-owning-a-home millennials felt about the economy and their prospects for the future. For the most part, the survey found that the economy bums everyone out. It also illustrated an interesting phenomenon. Black, Latino, and Asian respondents reported feeling more economically insecure than whites. A majority feared "being laid off from work" or "being forced to work reduced hours or take a cut in pay." The survey also identified an "economic vulnerability gap," in which fewer minorities felt like they could find a good job, compared to whites. Forty-one percent of black millennials said that they felt there was a lack of jobs in their communities, while only 19 percent of whites felt that way; 48 percent of blacks also reported experiencing workplace discrimination and discrimination while looking for a job.

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We have a candidate… who talks about the how there are deficits in the country that specifically affect whites. It's not surprising that young whites would worry.

However, when asked about the future, a weird reversal of fortunes occurred. Seventy-four percent of young blacks thought they would do better financially than their parents. Comparatively, for young white respondents, the future looked decidedly grimmer: Only 59 percent said they thought would be able to.

"White voters, including young white voters, hear the narratives about the shrinking power of the country and narratives about the changing demographics of the country—people of color increasing in the percentage of the population," Cohen said. "Now we have a candidate like Donald Trump who talks about the how there are deficits in the country that specifically affect whites. It's not surprising that young whites would worry."

Trump might have a white millennial problem, but his campaign's mission to stoke the fears of genuine believers in a white cultural genocide—by saying that immigrants take jobs and rape white women, that blacks need to be subject to "law and order," and that we need to make America great again—seems to be resonating with the demographic, not just your unflappably racist uncle. Cohen says this vision of "white economic vulnerability" could be driving the support of young white voters toward Trump.

Read more: How Clinton's Call for Equal Pay Could Change Lives

But the numbers also show that a lot of millennials are simply not sure about either candidate. There's a lot of people who are turned off by Trump yet still not drawn to Clinton. Only 55 percent of black voters, 52 percent of Asian voters, and 43 percent of Latino voters said they support her. While it's more than the expressed support for Trump, those are not great numbers. And it's apparently not just because they want to vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein: 16 percent of all participants said they will not vote.

"The biggest issue is whether young people will come out to vote at all. When we asked black participants what the most important issues are, they say police brutality. They want a candidate that will speak to them. When we asked Latinos, they have said the most important issue is immigration. And they reject Trump's proposals of a wall, but they're also waiting for Hilary Clinton to articulate an inspiring vision of what immigration could mean for the country to get them to the polls. I think that in order to get millennials to the polls, you're going to have to do more than say the other candidate is bad," Cohen said. "They're waiting to be inspired. They need to hear more than what each candidate is going to do to the tax code."