The Washington Post profiled a 24-year-old Hillary Clinton field organizer who described "striking out" repeatedly while trying to garner support for the Democrat on the campus of Ohio State University.
Reporter James Hohmann joined Tyler Hoisington, who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) during the primary, on Sunday as he knocked on "every door on both sides of four city blocks" over the course of more than two hours and did not get a single person to register to vote or commit to supporting Clinton:
It was a stark illustration of apathy and ambivalence five weeks before Election Day. Millennial voters, who were so instrumental in Barack Obama’s victories, are lukewarm at best about Clinton, even four months after she vanquished Bernie Sanders.
Obama held his first rally of the 2012 reelection campaign here on the campus of OSU, drawing a crowd of 10,000–mostly students. That thrill is gone.
Two African American females were smoking cigarettes on their front porch when Hoisington asked if they were registered. "I keep that kind of thing to myself," she said coldly, turning away to continue her conversation.
At another point, a Donald Trump supporter at Ohio State told Hoisington he was voting for the Republican and then burped.
"Striking out," Hoisington said, as he slogged from one street to the next. "This is the slowest start I’ve had."
Sanders crushed Clinton among younger voters during the Democratic primaries. As a former supporter, Hoisington said Sanders die-hards are usually not persuadable and look at Clinton as just as bad an option as Trump:
As he walked down Summit Street, not far from campus, Hoisington said that he still runs into a lot of Sanders diehards. Are they persuadable? "Not all the time," he sighed. "So the angle I try to take is, ‘I know you might not like Hillary or Trump, but the two really aren’t comparable.’ But in their eyes they are. In their eyes, they’re equally evil. Which is nuts to me."
"I definitely have been able to change a few people’s minds, but a lot revert to just Gary Johnson," he added. "So I say, do you not believe in climate change? And a lot of people say, well, can you prove climate change? It’s really frustrating."
Not helping matters for Clinton with millennial voters is leaked audio reported on by the Washington Free Beacon that included Clinton in February referring to young Sanders supporters as economically frustrated people "living in their parents’ basement." The Clinton team responded that she was expressing sympathy for their plight.
Clinton is campaigning in Ohio on Monday with events in Toledo and Akron. The critical battleground state is a toss-up between Clinton and Trump in the polls.
The Washington Post report showed the stark difference between millennial support for Barack Obama in his two elections and Clinton. Gallup polls show only a third of adults under 30 favor Clinton, with a significant portion of that age group likely to support Libertarian Gary Johnson in the election. ABC polling showed that while Obama beat Mitt Romney by 30 points with 18-to-29 year-olds, Clinton leads Trump in that group by just two points.