Turns out it’s not just Hillary that’s having trouble with millennials

In a recent Pew Research Center poll among young people, Hillary leads with 47%, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s candidate, comes in second with 22% and Trump finishes last with 21%.  While this poll has Trump faring the worst among young people, three other polls from Quinnipiac University, Suffolk University and Fox News have him barely beating Johnson and Jill Stein, the Green Party’s candidate, while trailing Hillary by nearly 20 points.

These numbers don’t bode well for Trump, given his name recognition from The Apprentice and his massive social media presence, which should give him an advantage, however slight, over Hillary with millennials.  His current struggle with young voters seems to be a bad omen for his campaign.

While it does look pretty bad for Trump, all of these polls have him doing worse with young voters than earlier polls do.  In addition to that, third party candidates tend not to perform as well on election day as their poll numbers might indicate, because most people tend to vote for someone who is more likely to win.  Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight also adds that not all of Johnson’s support is coming from Trump.

He points out that, on average, adding at least one third-party candidate narrows Clinton’s lead over Trump by a percentage point.  This is hardly surprising, as third-party candidates tend to garner much of their support from young voters.  Young people tend to be more disillusioned with the two-party system in place, so they flock to candidates who aren’t part of the establishment of either major party such as Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul.

Trump will have to work harder if he wants to secure the youth vote, because if he can’t win young people over, he will have a much more difficult time winning in November.