WMU professor points to millennial vote as one reason Clinton lost

By Madison Bennett | MLive

KALAMAZOO, MI - Shocked, scared and sad are some of the feelings students at Western Michigan University who voted for Hillary Clinton are experiencing following the Democratic nominee for president's loss to Donald Trump in Tuesday's election.

"It's hard to explain the emotion," Matthew Derrick, a senior at WMU said about the election results.

"His campaign is just completely based on hate and I'm just scared for those people that are a part of the groups that he ran against," WMU senior Amanda Cockroft said of President-elect Donald Trump.

An exit survey of 100 random students conducted by Western senior Harold Fish, besides one student who claimed to have written in the university's President John Dunn, found 66 percent of those voters at WMU's Bernhard Center had chosen Clinton.

The 2016 election was expected to create a larger than normal voter turnout and that seemed to hold true on campus, with people across the state waiting in lines lasting for more than an hour. Voters at the Bernhard Center had to wait for nearly an hour-and-a-half at around 6 p.m., just hours before polls closed.

While long lines like those at WMU may have created the impression that millennials got out to vote, exit polls show that at least nationally they actually didn't.

According to WMU political science professor Peter Wielhouwer, Clinton did not generate the same enthusiasm among young voters as President Barack Obama did. "In 2006 and 2012, younger voters made up 12 to 13 percent of the electorate," Wielhouwer said.

Exit polls from this election, he said, showed that millennials only made up about 10 percent of the voting electorate. While Clinton ultimately won among voters in the 18-29 age range as shown in polling from both CNN and the New York Times, she still had trouble reaching the entire generation.

"We know that from the Democratic primary that there's a significant break with Hillary Clinton among young voters who actually preferred Bernie Sanders," Wielhouwer said.

Of the dip in turnout from the 2012 to 2016 in younger voters, Wielhouwer said: "I'm convinced that that 1-2 percent difference could have tipped things" in Clinton's favor.

The WMU political science professor said Trump found success in appealing to those who were "economically left behind," which includes older voters.

"The older people, they have experience in the economy and some of them were economically left behind, and so that in itself simply doesn't have a resonance to young people because they haven't been left behind," he said.

While some of America is showing its displeasure with the election outcome through protests against Trump, Wielhouwer offers some advice for young people who are feeling down: "For millennials who are frustrated, I think that over time as they age, when they get married, when they buy a house, when they have children, their participation in their civic life of their communities will naturally increase and they will find their place in the American electorate," he said.

"I would just encourage patience and persistence."

This post originally appeared Nov. 10, 2016 on MLive.com.