Capitol and Cathedral
Over the weekend, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine to respond to suggestions that Hillary Clinton is struggling to attract younger voters’ support.
Supposedly this concern arises from polls that show libertarian candidate Gary Johnson” and “none/don’t plan to vote” capturing larger-than-expected swaths of Millennials. In fact, however, all polls show Clinton drawing more support from Millennials than any other candidate, often by substantial margins.
Still, the Sunday shows have to talk about something. And Tim Kaine was ready for Todd’s question, posing five “litmus test areas” that arguably leave Millennials with no other option but vote for Clinton.
“Do you believe in climate science or don’t you? Millennials do, Hillary Clinton and I do, Donald Trump doesn’t. Do you believe women should be able to make their own health care decisions, or don’t you? Millennials do, Hillary Clinton and I do, Donald Trump doesn’t. Do you believe in immigration reform or don’t you? We do, millennials do, Donald Trump doesn’t. Do you believe in LGBTQ equality? We do, millennials do, Donald Trump doesn’t. And finally, do you have a plan to deal with college affordability? We have one. Millennials need one. And Donald Trump, with Trump University, has ripped off students,” Kaine said.
Politifact sifts through survey data estimating Millennials’ views on these five issues, rating Kaine’s assertion “mostly true.”
On immigration reform, LBGT rights, and college affordability, Clinton can justifiably claim overwhelming Millennial support. But not so much on abortion rights.
Millennials agree decisively with Clinton’s position on immigration, gay rights and college affordability, and by narrow margins on climate change and abortion rights.
A 2014 poll by the nonpartisan organization PRRI (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute) in Washington found that 55 percent of millennials thought abortion should be legal in most or all cases. The same level of support is seen in people under 68. Only older Americans showed less support for abortion, with 43 percent of people over 67 saying it should be legal.
Similarly, when Gallup surveyed abortion attitudes in 2015, it found that 53 percent of people age 18 to 34 identified themselves as “pro choice,” versus 52 percent of 35- to 55-year-olds and 47 percent of people over 55.
There is a persistent myth that young people are as enthusiastic about abortion rights as they are about LGBT rights. It’s simply not true. We can argue about the reasons why, but we cannot pretend that Millennials are as liberal in their abortion attitudes as they are when it comes to their LGBT friends.
We have been talking about this for a long time. Way back in 2011, Megan McArdle at The Atlantic asked, “Why isn’t Millennial support for abortion rights increasing?” Critiquing a typical progressive take on the matter, McArdle gets at a key reason why young people, even young conservatives, might get on board with the LGBT-rights agenda but still not want to champion abortion. Conservatives may suppose, and note the long parenthetical following the quotation,
The harm from gay marriage is pretty nebulous, the harm from abortion is pretty obvious to everyone. (Whether or not you think it’s important enough to ban is of course an entirely separate question…but I think it’s fair to say that everyone recognizes that something unpleasant happens to some sort of organism that absent the abortion, will almost certainly turn into a human being.)
There are plenty of other angles to this story — race, religion, experience — but we should stop supposing that support for unrestricted abortion rights belongs in the same constellation of issues on which certain demographic groups are thought to be overwhelmingly liberal. This is even true for Millennials, the least religious age group of all.
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