Obama job approval drops 17 points among young Americans

The latest poll from CNN is bad news for the president, who rode to reelection on the backs of young and minority voters. But Republicans are doing even worse.

|
Jason Reed/Reuters/File
President Obama shakes hands with college students after speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington last month about student loan rates. Obama has seen his approval ratings among young Americans drop sharply.

The latest wave of polls shows President Obama’s job approval rating drifting steadily downward, into the mid-40s, and that’s hardly surprising.

Controversies around US government surveillance of telephones and the Internet, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea party groups, Justice Department snooping into journalists’ phone records, and the US response to last September’s terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, have put the Obama administration on the defensive.

Public views of Mr. Obama’s personal qualities have also taken a hit: The latest CNN/ORC International survey, released Monday, shows that, for the first time in his presidency, half the public does not believe Obama is honest and trustworthy. All of the above cuts into Obama’s “political capital,” that elusive commodity that fuels a president's second-term mojo.

But perhaps most concerning for the president are the numbers among young adults.  

“The drop in Obama's support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30, who, along with black Americans, had been the most loyal part of the Obama coalition," CNN polling director Keating Holland said in the cable network’s report.

That’s just one poll, and the margin of error for any one age group is high – plus or minus 7.5 percent. Among Americans age 18 to 34, Obama’s now at 48 percent, not too far from 50. But it’s a cohort Obama can ill afford to lose. And there have been other recent worrying signs for the president among the young.

An April survey of 3,100 voters under age 30, the so-called “millennials,” by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University shows that only 39 percent trust the president to do the right thing, compared with 44 percent in 2010.

The news, in fact, is bad for Washington and politicians in general, as young voters show increasing negativity and cynicism with the political process. Almost three-fifths of young Americans (59 percent) said they agree that elected officials seem motivated by “selfish reasons” – an increase of 5 points since 2010. Some 56 percent agree that “elected officials don’t have the same priorities I have,” also up 5 points from 2010. And 28 percent agree that “political involvement rarely has any tangible results,” an increase of 5 points since 2010.

“If you are 24 years old, all you know is petty partisan politics while big issues aren’t getting addressed, while the economy is still struggling,” IOP director Trey Grayson told The New York Times.

Still, Republicans hardly have reason to gloat. A post-mortem on the 2012 elections released June 3 by the College Republicans, using polling and focus groups, called the current situation among young voters “dismal.”

When young Obama voters who were seen as potentially “winnable” by the GOP last fall were asked to describe the Republican Party, the terms were harsh: “closed-minded,” “racist, “rigid,” and “old-fashioned.”

And while young voters wanted lower taxes and less government regulation on small business – bedrock GOP views – they felt they would reap the benefits of Republican policies only after becoming wealthy.

“We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer a hand to help you get there,” the report said.

The College Republican National Committee consoled itself with the disillusion many young voters feel with the Democratic Party. But it’s a lesser-of-two-evils proposition. Young Americans “simply dislike the Republican Party more.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Obama job approval drops 17 points among young Americans
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2013/0617/Obama-job-approval-drops-17-points-among-young-Americans
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe