New Poll Shows Millennials Don’t Like Trump, Twitter

Thursday, January 17, 2019
GoLocalWorcester Sports Team

Donald Trump

President Donald Trump, his Twitter habit or Twitter, in general, are not well liked among millennials, according to a new poll released by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion.

According to the poll, 62% of Americans ages 18 to 37 said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance and only 37% said they view the president favorably.

Of those polled, 54 percent identify themselves as Democrats, 32 percent as Republicans, 12 percent as independents and 2 percent were unsure.

Among millennials who identified as Republicans, more than 80 percent said they approve of the job Trump is doing as president.

“Millennials largely dislike Trump because they so strongly identify with the Democratic party and independent millennials are prone to agree with Democrats on a lot of policy issues. Republican millennials like Trump and like the job he’s doing as president, but two-fifths of them want the president to tweet less. It goes to show that even among his staunchest supporters, there’s concern about the president’s personal approach to the office,” said John Cluverius, associate director of the Center for Public Opinion and assistant professor of political science, who oversaw the poll and analyzed the results.

Trump & Twitter

According to the poll, a majority of millennials do not approve of Trump’s behavior on Twitter.

Sixty-eight percent said the president tweets too much, 26 percent said he tweets about the right amount and 6 percent said he doesn’t tweet enough.

Among Republicans, 40 percent said they feel the president tweets too much.

The poll also shows that Twitter itself has a low approval rating.

According to the poll, 37% say they view the social media platform favorably. Facebook gets the same low mark, too, with a 37 percent favorability rating.

“I was surprised to see such low favorables for Facebook and Twitter, given that this generation makes up a huge part of the user bases of both platforms. Younger millennials may be switching to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, but I think this finding reinforces the idea that while lots of people use these services, they don’t make people happy,” said Cluverius.

Poll Method

The poll was independently conducted by the University of Massachusetts Lowell, designed and analyzed by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion and fielded by YouGov, both of which are members of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative.

Data was collected online from Nov. 30 through Dec. 10, 2018; YouGov interviewed 1,166 respondents who were then matched to a sample of 1,000 to produce the final data set of Americans ages 18 to 37.

The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percent.