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Millennials Poll: Trump Not Winning Over Young Adults

President polls especially poorly among minorities

President Donald Trump has not polled well among millennials. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
President Donald Trump has not polled well among millennials. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)

President Donald Trump is not off to a good start in his political career, according to millennials in a new poll.

The president has just a 22 percent approval rating among the young adults surveyed in a NBC News/GenForward study. Sixty-three percent disapprove of the job he is doing while 15 percent neither approve nor disapprove.

The survey was conducted from Oct. 26 through Nov. 10 among a nationally representative sample of 1,876 adults aged 18 to 34, recruited and administered by NORC at the University of Chicago, according to NBC. The poll’s margin of error is 3.92 percentage points.

Trump is not meeting the expectations of millennials of color, the poll found. A majority of white millennials, 52 percent, said the president is performing about how they expected, but 57 percent of African-Americans, 61 percent of Latinos, and 52 percent of Asian-Americans said Trump is doing worse than they expected.

A handful of think pieces in the run-up to the 2016 elections attributed the fate of the presidency to millennials, who were much more likely than older voters to vote for a third-party candidate or write in their own.

But just 22 percent of millennials surveyed in the NBC News/GenForward study said they voted for Trump. Thirty-five percent said they voted for Hillary Clinton, 12 percent voted for someone else, and 31 percent said they didn’t vote at all.

Majorities of millennials across all racial subgroups said they were either “concerned” or “scared” about the Trump presidency, including 86 percent of African-Americans and 84 percent of Latinos.

Thirty-four percent of white millennials characterized their feelings about the Trump presidency as “excited” or “optimistic.”

Majorities in every racial subgroup also said Trump’s presidential legacy would that of a “not very good” or “poor president.”

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