Heading into the 2012 presidential election, younger voters, whose political involvement was so crucial to President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, have become disillusioned and unenthused about the political process, and many expected Obama to lose his re-election campaign.
According to the Millenials poll of college-age voters, released Thursday by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, younger voters are noticeably less enthusiastic at this point in the campaign than they were four years ago.
Obama’s approval rating among college students has dropped below 50 percent for the first time, falling to an all-time low of 48 percent. When the last poll was conducted in late February and early March of 2011, it was at 60 percent.
Among the entire sample, Obama’s approval rating fell nine percentage points since the last poll. Among young white voters, it fell by nine percentage points. With Hispanics, the drop was particularly dramatic, with his approval rating falling 16 percentage points, from 68 percent to 52 percent.
The president’s approval ratings remain “rock solid,” according to IOP Polling Director John Della Volpe, among young blacks.
According to IOP Director Trey Grayson, an “ominous sign” for Obama is that a plurality of young people predict he will lose re-election. Thirty-six percent of 18-29-year-olds said they believed he will lose, while 30 percent said he will win. Even among respondents who said they had been politically active in his campaign last cycle, just 48 percent — less than half — said they expected him to be re-elected.
Della Volpe said that the answer to that question can be “a foreshadowing” of what the results of an election would be. In some ways, he suggested, it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because those voters who are less enthusiastic and believe Obama is going to lose will not necessarily go volunteer and actively campaign to help him win. (RELATED: Full coverage of Barack Obama)
Grayson warned, however, that “the fact that they’re souring on the president doesn’t necessarily translate to good news for whoever the eventual Republican nominee is going to be.”
Citing both the survey data and some qualitative research they’ve done — like focus groups — he described younger voters as “in kind of a punishment zone.”
“They’re not necessarily going to vote for the Republican in significant numbers,” he said. Instead, they must just choose not to organize, vote, or display any enthusiasm a year from now. Though there is “potential” for a migration to the right, he said he had not “seen much evidence of significant movement.”
Della Volpe was careful to draw the distinction that a lack of enthusiasm for politics did not mean that young Americans have stopped caring about the future of the country.
“What we’re telling you today is that young Americans are upset, disappointed, disengaged at the moment. It doesn’t mean they don’t love their country,” Della Volpe said. He noted that a majority of young Americans volunteer regularly.
“Young people want to help their country, they just don’t think at this moment that engaging in the current political system is the best way to do that,” he explained.
Grayson and Della Volpe described the sentiment among younger voters as “disappointment,” “disapproval,” “disillusionment, disengagement,” but not necessarily anger. They said this could in part explain the lack of engagement with the Occupy movement, which the survey found was “not resonating with millenials on a large scale,” according to Han Hi, a Harvard student who collaborated on the poll.
IOP conducted 2,028 interviews with Americans between the ages of 18 to 20 from Nov. 23 through Dec. 3. The margin of error of the poll is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
