Sixty percent of millennials recently surveyed by the Harvard Institute of Politics support sending ground troops to fight ISIS, yet almost the same amount are not willing to enlist to help the military take on radical Islamic terrorists, the institute announced Thursday. When the question was asked in the spring, 57 percent supported putting boots on the ground against the extremists.
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In short, 47% of young people believe that troop action against the Islamic State is necessary, but most feel serving is not their responsibility. The interviews were conducted between late October and early November, so the results do not reflect Republican candidate Donald Trump’s recent controversial statement about temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States.
When it comes to the Democratic primary, Harvard found found that Sanders, who polled at 1 percent in the spring, now led Clinton among the 18- to 29-year-old subgroup, 41 percent to 35 percent.
Regardless of which candidate they would prefer, 43 percent of likely Republican voters said Carson is qualified to be president (17 percent say he is not qualified), and 38 percent said Trump is qualified (39 percent said he is not). While 49 percent said it remained alive for them personally, 48 percent said it was dead.
“It’s clearly kind of a wedge issue – something that illustrates significant differences in the way that young Republicans and young Democrats view America”, said Della Volpe. Turns out, a substantial number of young people are behind the “big, attractive wall” agenda. Seventy percent of Republicans surveyed supported the wall, compared with 31 percent of Democrats.
American’s youth are down on the longer term, with almost half of these ages 18 by way of 29 believing the “American Dream” is more lifeless than alive, a nationwide survey let go Thurs.by Harvard College’s Institute of Politics shows.
Overall, younger Republican voters had real estate mogul Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson in a near dead heat. Fifty-one percent of respondents said integrity is the most important characteristic, followed by 33 percent who chose level-headedness and 26 percent that said authenticity. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points on the full sample. And a majority say they’re not following the presidential race.
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In the Harvard poll, 20% of those questioned consider themselves “politically engaged and active” – a 5 percentage point drop from a similar survey conducted in fall 2011. Turns out, the more education respondents had received, the more likely they were to believe the dream was still alive: 58% of college students said they felt the American Dream was alive for them personally, compared to only 42% of those who had never enrolled in college.
