Poll Shows Clinton Losing Support of Democratic Women
Why Millennial Women Matter More
By Nathaniel Haas
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll spells trouble for Hillary Rodham Clinton in a crucial demographic for her bid to capture the White House: Democratic women.
The surface-level numbers show a decline in expected support, but conversations with Democratic women — particularly millennials — reveal a less menacing “Clinton-fatigue” that might not hurt as poorly at the ballot box as the numbers suggest.
The new poll, which has a 3.5-point error margin, shows that in the last eight weeks, the percentage of “Democratic-leaning female voters” who said they expected to vote for Clinton has dropped from a July high of 71 percent all the way down to 42.
“I don’t want to vote for Hillary, but if she’s the nominee, I will. But I’m just over her. She’s just old news,” said Megan Eme, a 21 year-old student at the University of Southern California. Eme is from Chicago and registered to vote in Indiana, and voted for a Democrat in every Indiana statewide and national slot in 2012 and 2014. Eme might be “over” Hillary Clinton, but that wouldn’t change her vote.
“If I don’t vote for the first female president, I couldn’t live with it,” she told Neon Tommy.
While the poll found “no statistically significant difference between the backing she drew from women older than 50 and her standing among younger women,” that divide is worth investigating. It was young voters, after all, who made the difference for Barack Obama in 2008.
“If not for millennials in Iowa in 2008, Barack Obama would be running for President today and not Clinton, because she would have been president,” John Della Volpe to me in a June interview. Della Volpe conducts an annual poll of millennials and directs polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics. In the 2008 Iowa caucus, Clinton finished a distant third behind eventual winner Barack Obama and soon-to-be tabloid headline John Edwards.
“From that night forward, I believe Clinton’s campaign, advisors, and [she] personally, have understood the impact of millennials,” Della Volpe said.
The Clinton campaign has been slow to the task, failing to capitalize on low-hanging fruit like social issues that give them a natural advantage over Republicans among millennial voters. According to Pollster John Zogby, the founder of the Zogby Poll and coauthor of the book, “First Globals: Understanding, Managing, and Unleashing Our Millennial Generation,” the Clinton campaign’s key benchmark is overcoming “establishment syndrome,” something young people find toxic.
“Bill Clinton could do that because he had a certain flexibility and a coolness and a doer, and I don’t suppose that [Hillary] can do that,” he said. “Hence, she gives off the appearance of being the leader of the establishment that millennials just don’t get.”
The failure doesn’t come on the issues Clinton stands for — a Harvard Institute of Politics poll in April showed 55 percent of 18–29 year-olds wanted Democrats to stay in the White House in 2016 — it comes in Clinton’s ability to communicate to them in a relatable fashion. Zogby notes that the GOP’s stance on social issues already scares many young women and their millennial male counterparts, something that should turn them into low hanging fruit for Democrats.
“Social issues like gay marriage, abortion, and privacy, those are the sorts of things where the GOP just scares the b’jesus out of 20 and 30 something’s,” Zogby said. “Ultimately, Obama got 61% of 18–29 year olds, and the biggest factor there was the high turnout of women in that age group — 71% of whom voted for him.”
Amplifying the problem for Clinton is a rising sense among millennials that the system in Washington is broken. They are looking for candidates who, as Bill Clinton championed, “feel their pain,” not candidates who feel the need to fundraise.
Eme’s sentiment tapped into another polling problem for Clinton: since June, her personal approval rating has more unfavorable points than favorable. Amanda Swanson, who goes to school at American University in Washington, D.C., voted for every Democrat she was able to in 2014, but like Eme, registers the same “Clinton-fatigue.”
Swanson said that as much as she wants to be supportive of Clinton’s history-making bid, she has a lot of issues with her institutional status as a politician. She says she would have preferred Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whom she described as doing a “ significantly better job representing a host of marginalized communities, particularly individuals in poverty.”
Emily Bosch studied political science and women studies at Concordia College and is getting her masters in communications studies at Kansas. While she said there are women she’d rather elect over Clinton, the political stakes — including several potential Supreme Court nominations in the next eight years — are too high to make Clinton-fatigue a deciding factor for her.
“Hillary shares a lot of my core values, and I don’t think she’s bad by any means, but I certainly think there are better candidates,” she said. Referring to the long-shot bid of Sanders, Bosch said, “It’s the lesser of two evils — I would prefer to vote for someone whom I have less in common with and win, then vote for someone I prefer, and lose.”
The Sanders campaign, rather than being a magnet for female voters disaffected by Clinton, might be the “competitive push that she needs to electrify her campaign with new ideas,” wrote Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, for CNN.
For one, Sanders doesn’t offer the history-making chance to elect the first female President important to a voter like Eme. Two, Swanson’s remarks suggest that female dissatisfaction with Clinton might be better explained as constructive criticism, and less as a decline in support. If Clinton can overcome her perceived establishment ties, and communicate issues that voters are already incredibly receptive to, she can overcome the poll plunge.
Swanson had a similar response to Bosch and Emily when asked if she’d still vote for Clinton if she got the nomination: an unflinching “absolutely.” At least for now, the political stakes of keeping their party in the White House (and making history) may weigh more on the mind of Democrat women and millennials than Clinton’s perceived inadequacies as a candidate.
Nathaniel Haas is a law student at the University of Southern California. He enjoys writing about politics, and will be sad when Donald Trump is no longer running for President. Follow him on Twitter here, and send him an angry email here. To subscribe to alerts for new content, sign up for his mailing list here.
