Hillary got around 55% of young voters * — but instead of concentrating on those who voted for her it would be more instructive to focus on those who didn’t: 37% of the young said: “Yes, I choose You, Donald !”, and many did not vote in an understandable "A Plague on both your Houses’ fit. **
Had she enthused the same number as Obama did in 2012, that was 60% of the then youth vote: another 5% would have won her the election, not just the popular vote
Of course it was fairly unlikely that the young were succoured on the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s outpourings of bile, that are waved away by the ‘Lies ! All Lies ! folk’. More likely they were bored by a dreary old person full of self-importance and drowning in smug conceit who was in the White House before they were born.
As for Obama’s voters turning to Donald — since Hillary was too much:
*But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.
Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.
In recent months, Canter and other members of Global Strategy Group have delivered a detailed report of their findings to senators, congressmen, fellow operatives and think tank wonks – all part of an ongoing effort to educate party leaders about what the data says really happened in last year’s election.
“We have to make sure we learn the right lesson from 2016, that we don’t just draw the lesson that makes us feel good at night, make us sleep well at night,” Canter said.*
…
*Turning out the base, the data suggests, is simply not good enough.
“This idea that Democrats can somehow ignore this constituency and just turn out more of our voters, the math doesn’t work,” Canter said. “We have to do both.”
Democrats are quick to acknowledge that even if voters switching allegiance had been Clinton’s biggest problem, in such a close election she still could have defeated Trump with better turnout. She could have won, for instance, if African-American turnout in Michigan and Florida matched 2012 levels.*
McClatchy DC Bureau — Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost
- *Though voters ages 18-to-29 skewed liberal, more than a third did not: Fifty-five percent of young voters chose Clinton, down from the 60 percent that backed Obama in 2012, while 37 percent chose President-Elect Donald Trump.
The Atlantic — Dissecting The Youth Vote
*The post-election narrative has been that old white people voted for Donald J Trump and the rest of the country voted for Hillary R Clinton, and this is broadly true; among 18-29-year-olds, Trump earned 37 per cent of the vote to Clinton’s 55 per cent.
But this is also a convenient story - it obscures the awkward fact a lot of young Democrats failed to get out and vote. In 2012, President Obama earned an extra five per cent of the 18-29 vote.
Five per cent of the 18-29 year olds who voted in 2016 is about one million. That stray million didn’t go and vote Republican on Tuesday - they just didn’t vote at all.*