The majority of millennials do not like Donald Trump. Though young people have largely skewed left in presidential elections since 2008, the numbers do not look good for President Teeny Hands—according to a new poll, only 20 percent of voters under the age of 35 plan to vote for Trump, even though 32 percent of young voters went for John McCain in 2008, and 36 percent voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. This is bad news for Trump, but it's really just one more thing causing trouble for a campaign that's getting hairier by the day.
Indeed, a new Gallup poll says 56 percent of millennials surveyed support Hillary Clinton—albeit begrudgingly—over Trump, with half of all surveyed voters under 35 claiming they side with Democrats over the Republican Party. This is not specifically Trump's fault—even young Republicans want their party to move left on social issues like marriage equality and immigration.
Some more right-wing economic policies that might have appealed to younger voters have gotten drowned out by the GOP's adamant refusal to drop some of the faith-based ideology that's dominated the party's social issues platform over the years. As one young Republican told Time earlier this year, "Old Christian white people are dying out,"—this fact will haunt the GOP long after November, assuming Trump loses and we still get to have elections.
So Trump—and the GOP at large—has a millennial problem, just like he has a problem when it comes to women and, very pressingly, black voters. He's also got a problem with his own campaign.
Both the Times and the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump's advisors have been struggling to keep the candidate on-message. They want him to focus more on attacking Clinton on the issues and less on attacking, say, Clinton's life, or the media, or wars members of his own party started, or families who lost their sons in said wars.
Trump's poll numbers do not look very good for him, not that we can start breathing easy just yet. As FiveThirtyEight points out, he has a better chance of winning the election than one has of losing a game of Russian roulette, and in this case the gun's pointed at all our heads. Still, Trump's people are panicking, and it looks like they're worried their candidate isn't taking this whole "running for President" thing as seriously as he should. "He doesn’t seem to be as unnerved by these things that go wrong as the people around him," Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of 9/11 Town and current #1 Trump fan, told the Times. "I think it is true that maybe it took him a little while to realize that we’re moving from a primary campaign to a presidential campaign."
So, Trump can't be tamed, and it seems like he doesn't even care. "I’ll just keep doing the same thing I’m doing right now,” he told CNBC in an interview last week. “And at the end, it’s either going to work, or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice, long vacation." A vacation! I hear Hades is lovely in autumn.
