{"id":14836,"date":"2015-02-03T16:12:34","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14836"},"modified":"2015-02-03T16:12:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:12:34","slug":"new-youth-politics-poll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14836","title":{"rendered":"a new youth political poll"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first youth poll of the 2016 election is out, and it appears to be solid methodologically,\u00a0with a phone sample and 1,000 respondents (up to age 34). It’s from Fusion<\/a>. I am not interested in the young adults’ preference among the\u00a0presidential candidates, because now\u00a0is way too early to be forecasting\u00a0the election. (For the record, young adults prefer\u00a0Hillary right now.) But I am interested in these nuggets:<\/p>\n

Party and ideology: The biggest group is composed of Independents (46%), but when you ask which way people “lean,” the results are 43% Democrats and 31% Republicans. (Most political science research finds that Independent leaners behave exactly like party members.) Fifty-seven percent say\u00a0government is \u201chelpful,\u201d much higher than the national rate and a sign of a persistent Democratic tilt. About two thirds say\u00a0they belong to the same party as their parents. It looks as if the remaining third has\u00a0mostly shifted left of their older relatives.<\/p>\n

Knowledge: Only 23% of respondents can\u00a0name one of their US Senators. The rates are\u00a020% for women,\u00a018% for\u00a018- to 24-year-olds, 16% for\u00a0Latinos, and 10 percent for\u00a0African-Americans. This is a form of political knowledge that I would really like to be higher. If you don’t know who represents you, you are not able to hold your representatives accountable. Note that this is a distinct problem from the scores on civics exams,\u00a0because standardized tests never ask about current facts\u00a0like the names of one’s elected officials. If we were guided by standardized test scores, we would spend less time on current events, not more time.<\/p>\n

Issues: The top issue is the usual–“jobs and the economy”–at 19%. Health care follows at 10%, and education, at 7%. Police brutality is the top issue for 1%, as is racial harmony. Climate change is also at 1%. The most striking finding here is the wide dispersal of top issues. As I often note, young adults are not an interest group. They do not have one or a few defining issues. They face all<\/em> the issues that\u00a0confront us as human beings, from\u00a0taxes (1%) to immigration (4%).<\/p>\n

Age of candidates: We are often asked whether young voters prefer younger candidates. That question will come up again if Hilary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. For what it’s worth, this survey asked whether respondents would be more likely to vote “if there were more young candidates.” Seventy percent thought it would make no difference. Twenty-six percent saw it as a positive change, and\u00a06% thought they would be less<\/em> likely to vote if there were more young candidates.<\/p>\n

Comedy: And if comedians ran for president, the\u00a0leading candidate among young adults would be Colbert, followed pretty closely by Stewart and Fay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first youth poll of the 2016 election is out, and it appears to be solid methodologically,\u00a0with a phone sample and 1,000 respondents (up to age 34). It’s from Fusion. I am not interested in the young adults’ preference among the\u00a0presidential candidates, because now\u00a0is way too early to be forecasting\u00a0the election. (For the record, young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14836"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14852,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14836\/revisions\/14852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}