George W. Bush was the only Republican candidate who managed to become President without relying on young voters, in both 2000 and 2004. Otherwise, since 1972, every GOP candidate needed to convince this category that he’s the best choice for the U.S. before winning.
Front-runners are missing a point…
We’re talking about 49 million people, aged between 18 and 29, who are now considered a real force, able to influence the fate of Republican and Democrat nominees for the White House. But what happens when the current front-runners, the candidates with the biggest chances of taking part in the final clash for the spot in the Oval Office, aren’t able to convince young voters about how good they would be as President?
There’s no secret that when it comes to Democrats, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is highly popular among youngsters. Currently, Hillary Clinton managed to obtain an average of 15 percent of young votes in the first three Democrat contests. And this is very low! Even more, during Super Tuesday, just 37 percent of the young voters opted for her, while Senator Sanders scored 62 percent of the votes.
Hillary isn’t as appealing as The Bern
Most likely, Hillary Clinton will be the Democrats’ nomination winner, but she will have a very hard mission trying to gain the support of young voters. On the other side, if she fails to do this, things will get even harder for her in November.
Moving on to the Republicans, front-runner Donald Trump is in a similar situation. Well, he always likes to say the young voters love him, but let’s not forget who we’re talking about here.
Last month, when he was enjoying his Nevada win, Trump claimed that they “won with young” and “won with old”, but the truth is that just 31 percent of voters under 30 preferred him, while Florida Senator Marco Rubio won 37 percent of young voters.
And Nevada wasn’t an exception, as overall, young votes were shared between Rubio and Cruz, Trump managing to obtain a better results only in Mississippi, where he obtained 45 percent.
Young Republicans are undecided
To sum up, Donald Trump is far from being the candidate voters between 18 and 29 want as president. Indeed, young Republicans participate at the voting process in a huge number, surpassing every expectation, but until now they don’t seem to be uniting and support a single candidate.
U.S. history gives some strong hints on how strong young voters‘ influence is, according to Fox News. They have always opted for the candidate who focused on the issues they were interested in, like Ronald Reagan did, in 1984, or Barack Obama, in 2008.
If young Democrats are apparently supporting the candidate who doesn’t have the biggest chances of winning the nomination, Republicans haven’t decided upon a candidate yet. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should try focusing on young voters problems’ even more in the upcoming months, as they are the ones who actually have the power to change something!
