Trump’s approval rating drops among young Republicans

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump refused to explicitly blame white supremacists for violence in Charlottesville, Va., Republican Emmanuel Wilder couldn’t help but take it personally.

“I try not to let my feelings get ahead of the facts, but in this circumstance, it hurts,” the 30-year-old Wilder, a North Carolinabased African-American involved in GOP outreach efforts, told McClatchy at the time.

Five months later, it’s Trump’s Republican Party that is hurting — with young voters, and significantly, with young Republicans like Wilder, who may like Trump’s tax plan but are deeply bothered by his routinely divisive tone.

As the Trump presidency hits the one-year mark, the Republican Party confronts a yawning generational gap that has been exacerbated in recent months by Trump’s incendiary comments on race-related issues and the party’s official support for an accused child molester in Alabama’s Senate race.

Now, as few as a quarter of voters under the age of 30 approve of Trump’s job performance. And among young Republicans, Trump’s approval rating has plummeted 12 percentage points since the spring, according to Harvard’s Institute of Politics poll re- leased last month, down to 66 percent. That’s certainly robust, but well below Trump’s overall GOP approval rating that hovers around 80 percent.

“In a sentence, they are certainly not doing well,” said John Della Volpe, the polling director at the Institute of Politics. “That would be an understatement.”

It’s not that young Republicans are suddenly turning into progressives. To the contrary, those who choose to stay involved on college campuses often rally around Trump, and there is widespread conservative distaste for the protest-happy “resistance” movement.

But interviews with more than a dozen young Republican activists around the country reveal that one year into the Trump era, the party’s long-standing challenges with the next generation of voters are, in many cases, only getting worse.

After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, the College Republican National Committee authored its own “autopsy” report, warning that the party had a perception problem with young people in part because of “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”

Now, Republicans hold the White House, but some young conservatives fret that the most “outrageous statements” come from the president himself — especially on issues related to race and diversity.