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Why Trump Could Be a Problem for Republicans Long After He’s Gone
Trump came in 4th, behind not only Hillary but the third party nominees as well, and these are voters who will be part of the electorate for a long, long time to come.
If Trump really set out to see how much damage he could do to the party, he's doing a bang up job of it.
That’s because, as political scientists have noted over the years, political party identification is a notoriously “sticky” thing. Yes, Democrats can turn into Republicans and vice versa, but it doesn’t happen a whole lot and it typically doesn’t happen quickly.
To the extent that Trump is turning young voters away from the party, the GOP could find itself suffering lower support in coming election cycles from voters whose political perceptions were formed in an era dominated by Trump. And he is turning them away from the party. In droves.
In a McClatchy-Marist poll conducted this week, for example, voters aged 18 to 29 preferred Clinton to Trump by a more than 3-to-1 margin, 53 percent to 17 percent. When the poll was broadened to include Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, Trump came in fourth place, with just 9 percent of the vote. (Clinton still won, with 41 percent of the vote, followed by Johnson with 23 percent and Stein with 16 percent.)
Trump came in 4th, behind not only Hillary but the third party nominees as well, and these are voters who will be part of the electorate for a long, long time to come.
If Trump really set out to see how much damage he could do to the party, he's doing a bang up job of it.