A Gallup Poll released earlier this week shows that Millennials prefer Trump to Clinton on one issue: regulating Wall Street. Trump holds a 7-point lead on this single issue over Hillary Clinton. This is absurd. Every other issue shows Clinton handily trouncing Trump from national security to healthcare to education.
Trump is the anti-regulation messiah of Dante’s fourth circle of hell: greed. His career is built on gulling customers and stiffing business partners. Trump is also actively being sued on charges of fraud. He has undulated toward money and woman without consequence or a drop of decency. His plan is to deregulate Wall Street and Big Business, which is in stark contrast to Clinton. Millennials either don’t know this, or plain and simple they don’t trust Clinton after Bernie Sanders spent most of his campaign criticizing her Wall Street ties and the millions she made in speaking fees from financial firms.
A Quinnipiac University Poll released September 15 showed only 21% of 18- to 34-year-olds said she was honest. Doing a quick and crude survey of my schoolmates I found the same; many find Hillary Clinton “scheming” and “dishonest;” nearly all find Donald Trump “a racist moron.” Some just hate both of the candidates or don’t want anything to do with politics at all. And others are wasting their voting virginity on the barely breathing candidate Gary Johnson. Millennials finally taking part in politics hate it and want something new and something better. This explains Bernie Sanders’ success; he was the embodiment of change and progress, while Clinton is the establishment candidate.
The prevailing view is that Clinton is untrustworthy, a criminal, and influenced by big money and the establishment. But the only truth here is that Hillary Clinton is a career politician and Millennials 18 to 35 are just as polarized as the rest of the country on their opinion of her. Many of them are unable even to “hate vote” for her, holding their breath and casting a vote against a sexual predator-in-chief Trump.
This is the second presidential election I’ve voted in; I was too young in 2008, but used a mail-in-ballot for 2012, one national primary, one local mayoral race and one gubernatorial race. Politics is always on my mind, from debating friends, to arguing with my father, to becoming unusually angry and vague friends over social media. However, that’s me, an outlier, an old soul who takes the lesser of two evils argument without much moral conundrum and believes in people. I’m also voting for Hillary Clinton, while still tending my wounds, having felt the Bern.
However, reading this to understand a generation is a lot like writing it to understand a generation — it’s futile and ill-advised. This group of 83.1 million has lived through a world of fast and drastic change.
Parents will and have always wanted a few things for their children: good health and opportunities they never had. Millennials are more educated, healthy, tech savvy, socially conscious, connected, accepting and open to change than generations previous. We are loud and stubborn too, and refuse to accept the way things are, which is what makes us seem like children throwing tantrums because we can’t have a toy.
Millennials accept people for who they choose to be, not who we perceive them to be. The sheer irony of which befuddles me, accepting of all except of that one candidate on the left. There are young supporters on both sides, as with anything. But poll after poll has shown us that Millennials hate the top of both tickets with similar vitriol. Clinton for being a member of the machine, and Trump for being a hate sputtering, predator, cis-male, member of the one percent.
We protest and jeer because racism is rampant, our love is questioned, our trauma is downplayed or ignored and most importantly we’re trying to secure our own future. We are a generation of idealists willing to follow the futile fight. And we’re young enough to think we’re the first generation to think this way. Millennials should hate Trump based on our ideals and on his racism, misogyny and inability to answer the simplest question. Especially on his systematic sexual predation of women over the last 40 years. One strange comfort I have from my generation is that more of us hate Trump than hate Hillary.
