If you have been around for a sufficient number of years to indulge in this experiment, compare yourself at 18 to yourself at the age of 34. Perhaps your ambitions and attitudes have changed over that time, and maybe your voting behavior has too.
Contemplating the first 16 years of adulthood, leads to a pretty obvious question: how useful is the term “millennial” anyway? When it comes to understanding whether people will vote and how they’ll vote, it turns out the 18-to-34 age bracket has limited value.
That’s not just because people change. It’s also because the defining trait of millennials (from a demographer’s perspective at least) is diversity. For every 100 millennials, 44 are part of a minority race or ethnic group according to the Census Bureau’s latest figures. For every 100 Americans age 85 and over, just 11 aren’t white. And, since race is one of the best predictors of voting intention in the US, it might make a lot more sense to slice up this demographic rather than treating it as one, uniform voting bloc.
But that’s not how polling works. If you only have about a thousand people to try to predict national voting behavior, you can only interpret basic information. Imagine the alternative: if you used a survey to understand how 20-year-old, college-educated black women in America will vote, at best you’d probably be anticipating the behavior of tens of thousands of women based on just one person’s answer. Not great.
Once you average out all the nuanced differences between millennials, polling still reveals a difference between them and other age groups. According to analysis from the LA Times (which has its limitations), Americans of all ages are more likely to think that Democrat Hillary Clinton will win this election than believe Donald Trump will (currently, 50% expect a Clinton win compared to 45% who think Trump will win). But those views are weakest among millennials – polling suggests this age group is almost evenly split over who they think will win.
That could be because Americans aged 18 to 34 are more likely than older voters to consider a third-party alternative (many were forced to reconsider their options after their first-choice candidate, Democrat Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the presidential race). There’s good news and bad news for Clinton.
The good news: because age groups are more evenly distributed across the country than racial groups, millennials might not be able to swing a bunch of states.
But the bad news is that some millennials might be telling pollsters that they doubt a Democratic win because they don’t quite tell the truth in other survey questions about how they’ll vote or whether they’ll vote. If young Americans don’t feel comfortable telling a stranger that they want to vote for Trump or don’t plan on voting at all, then Clinton could be in even deeper trouble in November than first appears.
