Even though I don't write much about politics, somebody told me about this new poll UMass Lowell did on millennials and thought I'd write about it. Be warned before you read this, I am not intentionally reflecting my political views; I am simply sharing interesting statistics from the poll. Check out the original poll results here.
Millennials, or anyone born between 1982 until around 2002, are 'always on their phones', or 'never pay attention', right? (Well, that's what we always hear at least.) But are they paying attention to the politics going on currently? UMass Lowell's new poll shows that half of the millennials are following the presidential election news very closely and about 38 percent follow it somewhat closely. So, that's almost 90 percent that is following the election to some extent. In fact, four percent of millennials have already voted and almost 3 quarters of them are most likely going to vote in the election.
So, that's a lot of these phone-addicts paying attention to politics, but what do they think about politics? Well, more than half of those who plan to vote are Clinton supporters. Also, more of those who support Trump feel like they may change their mind than those who support Clinton. Actually, according to the polls, Trump is overwhelmingly disliked among the millennials.
Maybe they support Clinton more, but do they like her? The poll shows that only a little more than half thinks that she actually cares about people like them and even less think that she will bring the right kind of change to America. However, less than a quarter of them think that Trump is level-headed, honest, caring, or even qualified for the presidency and barely more than a quarter thinks he would bring positive change.
Interestingly enough, the poll even questioned how likely they were to like certain things over either of the candidates. More than half of them preferred a large meteor hitting earth and killing all life than Trump becoming the president, and just under a quarter of them would prefer that to either of the candidates. Also, more than a quarter would rather a random citizen be selected by lottery to become president than either of them. Another interesting point brought up in the study is that significantly less millennial Trump supporters believe in evolution than Clinton's supporters.
So neither one of the candidates are loved by the millennials, so time for the long-awaited question: what about Bernie? When the poll replaced Clinton with Sanders there was very slight difference in who they would vote for, with only a one percent increase from Clinton (66%) to Sanders (67%); however, Sanders did rank remarkably higher on who would be a "strongly favorable" option for the election.
As for which party they side with, the poll found that half the millennials were registered Democrats and less than a quarter were registered Republicans. In fact, the majority of them thought that Buzzfeed could almost always be trusted more than the Republican Party.
Sure, this is just one study about a very select group of people, but could it represent the entire population? It's unlikely, but it seems that we will only know for sure what the general population is thinking after the November election.
