MILLENIALS

I would not ask my mother to go hang out with my friends because I didn’t want her to worry about money,” said Tillett, whose brush with insolvency has deeply influenced his views.

The national debt is his No. 1 concern.

As a young black man, he’s turned off by remarks by Donald Trump that he finds racist and xenophobic, but likes Trump’s aggressive stance on the economy. “We’re trillions of dollars in debt and that should not be happening,” said Tillett, who started running track at a two-year college this month.

He strongly considered voting for Trump, but will now vote for Clinton because Trump has become “a loose cannon” in recent weeks. Still, he’s angry about Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State. “We have to basically question if we can truly trust her with all of our nation’s secrets,” he said.

Anibal David Cabrera was in high school when Tillett was just a small boy — but he’s part of the same generation.

The son of a Honduran mother and Dominican father, he graduated from college in 2008 as the recession was picking up steam. A finance major, he wanted to work for a hedge fund or bank, but the economic collapse meant jobs had dried up. Eventually Cabrera, now 31 and living in Tampa, Florida, got an accounting job at a small tech firm.

He feels he’s entering the prime of his life a few steps behind where he could have been, through no fault of his own.

A Jeb Bush die-hard in the primaries, he’s now supporting Trump and hopes the business mogul can make good on his promises.

“My biggest hope for the country would be a prosperous economy. That is something my generation has kind of never seen,” Cabrera said. “We never got to experience the rapid growth of the ’80s or the ’90s, and I think my generation would love to see that.”

Shared pain does not lead to shared views among his generation.

Millennial voters’ disdain for traditional party affiliation has made them particularly unpredictable. Half describe themselves as political independents, according to a 2014 Pew Research report — a near-record level of political disaffiliation. As a generation, they tend to be extremely liberal on social questions such as gay marriage, abortion and marijuana legalization. Yet they skew slightly conservative on fiscal policy and are more in line with other generations on gun control and foreign affairs.

Trip Nistico, a recent graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s law school, is an avid supporter of gun rights who goes to shooting ranges but also supports same-sex marriage. The 26-year-old Texas native voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 — his first presidential election — and Mitt Romney in 2012.

“I’m pretty liberal on social issues. I don’t really think that — on a national level — they’re really as important as some of these other issues we’ve been discussing,” he said.

He’s supporting Trump because his preferred candidate, the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, isn’t likely to crack the polls.

Trump remains wildly unpopular among young adults, however, and nearly two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 believe the Republican nominee is racist, according to the GenForward poll. Views of Hillary Clinton also were unfavorable, though not nearly to the same extent.

Many millennials are angry that Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders has withdrawn and are disillusioned with the electoral process.

Forty-two percent of voters under 30 have “hardly any confidence” that the Republican presidential nomination process is fair and 38 percent feel the same about the Democratic process, according to the GenForward poll. The survey was taken before the leak of Democratic National Committee emails that roiled the Democratic Party.

Bill and Kristi Clay, young parents and devout Christians from rural Ohio, offer a portrait of millennials struggling to choose a candidate who matches their values.

They have two sons, 4 and 6, and are adopting a child from the Philippines. They serve meals with their church at inner-city soup kitchens in nearby Columbus and have a mix of political views that, Bill Clay says, comes from following “the lamb, not the donkey or elephant.”

Kristi Clay opposes samesex marriage and abortion and names those as her top issues this election. Yet the 32-yearold school librarian is still reluctantly leaning toward voting for Clinton. “You have to look at the big picture,” she says.

Bill Clay, meanwhile, shares his wife’s views on the more conservative issues, but they hold what some would consider more liberal views on matters such as immigration.

“If we’re going to try to be Christian-like, and embrace