Poll: Young voters now voting for Clinton

Democrat presidential candidate leads among all young whites 35 percent to 22 percent, and by a 2-to-1 margin among those who are likely to vote

WASHINGTON—Liane Golightly has finally decided who she’ll vote for on election day.

Hillary Clinton is not a choice the 30-year-old Republican would have predicted, nor one that excites her.

But the former supporter of Ohio Gov. John Kasich says it’s the only choice she can make.

“I kind of wish it were somebody else, somebody that I could really get behind 100 percent,” said Golightly, an educator from Monroe, Michigan. She’s voting for Clinton, she said, only because she can’t stomach “childish” Donald Trump.

Like Golightly, many young voters are coming over to Clinton in the closing stretch of the 2016 campaign, according to a new GenForward poll of Americans 18 to 30.

Driving the shift are white voters, who were divided between the two candidates just a month ago and were more likely to support GOP nominee Mitt Romney than President Barack Obama in 2012.

In the new GenForward survey, Clinton leads among all young whites 35 percent to 22 percent, and by a 2-to-1 margin among those who are likely to vote. Clinton held a consistent advantage among young African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics in earlier GenForward polls, as she does in the new survey.

The new poll also suggests enthusiasm for voting has recently increased among young African-Americans, 49 percent of whom say they will definitely vote in November after only 39 percent said so in September.

Just over half of young whites, and about four in 10 Hispanics and Asian-Americans, say they will definitely vote.

GenForward is a survey of adults age 18 to 30 by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The first-of-its-kind poll pays special attention to the voices of young adults of color, highlighting how race and ethnicity shape the opinions of a new generation.

Overall, Clinton leads Trump among young likely voters 60 percent to 19 percent, with 12 percent supporting Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and 6 percent behind the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

If Clinton and Trump receive that level of support on election day, Clinton would match Obama’s level of 2012 while Trump would fall short of Romney’s.

It’s not necessarily because they like Clinton, but is nevertheless a late sign of strength among a voting bloc that the former secretary of state has struggled to win over. (AP)