Now that the presidential election is over, we can look back at what happened. Pollsters, commentators and average voters are trying to break down the events of November 8th.
What the heck happened?
One poll showed, even before the election, that there was a huge split between young voters and older ones.
The poll was conducted through SurveyMonkey, and was released as an interactive map on the site.
The map showed that if only millennials voted, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would have taken the election by a landslide. She would have won 41 out of 50 states, giving her a total of 508 electoral votes. The survey defined millennials as those between the ages of 18 and 34 years.
In contrast, if only those over the age of 65 had voted, Donald Trump would have won by a decent margin. With only the elderly voting, the map shows that the Democrats would have kept the Northeast and the far western states like California and Oregon. The vast majority of the middle U.S. would have been red and Trump would have earned 298 electoral votes.
Jewish Political News Updates reported that the Trump campaign was probably aware that they needed to appeal to a larger number of millennials than they had already. They wouldn’t have needed to win all of the millennial votes, but they definitely needed to turn a percentage of those young voters toward the Republicans.
That may be one reason why Donald Trump and his campaign tried to convince Bernie Sanders supporters to swing his way.
It may be also why Trump’s children decided to appear on Sean Hannity’s Fox TV show a few weeks before the election. They appealed directly to millennial voters, asking them to think carefully about what they wanted to see in a new president.
You can see that show here.
Featured image by ITU Pictures via Flickr. Available through CC-BY 2.0 generic license.
