Young voters not swayed by Bill Clinton’s history

Hillary Clinton’s campaign implicitly concedes the point, with Bill Clinton’s recent and coming schedules in Ohio, Florida, Iowa and other battlegrounds tilted to union groups and African-American audiences. Still, an August Gallup poll found the former president with a 56 per cent approval rating among adults ages 18-29.

Perhaps most encouraging for Bill Clinton in the millennial pursuit — and ominous for Trump — is that Onusko and many of her contemporaries express bewilderment and even disdain over the Republican nominee’s broadsides about the ex-president’s sexual history and Hillary Clinton’s actions in the political fallout.

“Bill Clinton was abusive to women,” Trump said in the second presidential debate, as three of the women who allege unwanted sexual encounters with Clinton sat in the audience at Trump’s invitation. “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women, and attacked them viciously.” He’d raised that subject intermittently before.

Hillary Clinton did not directly address Trump’s accusations that she had taken part in aggressive efforts by Clinton associates to discredit women who had gone public with allegations about her husband.

Even before the disclosure of an explosive 2005 tape in which Trump boasted in vulgar terms about imposing himself on women at will, young people hardly regarded the billionaire as a man who respects women.

“The only people I know who support Trump are men, mostly older men,” said Selena Peterson, 19, of Canton, Ohio, who voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary but has no qualms about voting for Clinton over Trump.

Dominic Detwiler, 18, from Lancaster, Ohio, was a Sanders supporter who is deciding between Clinton and the Green Party’s Jill Stein — but not because he’s contemplating Bill Clinton’s treatment of women. “I’m over the whole Monica Lewinsky thing,” he said of the White House intern at the centre of the 42nd president’s 1998 impeachment. “I mean, would I have divorced him if he’d done that to me? Sure. But that wasn’t my decision; it was Hillary’s.”

It’s certainly not that young voters aren’t familiar with Bill Clinton’s transgressions, confirmed or alleged. “Impeachment was one of the first things we learned about him in school,” said Peterson, “and, of course, people in history class would make the Monica jokes.”

Will Maher, 25, of Fort Collins, Colorado, was 7 years old in 1998. “I remember my parents turning off the television during the news and saying, ‘We’re not going to discuss that,’” he said. Maher, who hasn’t decided how to vote, says: “If he was running again, maybe that would matter.” As for Hillary Clinton, “I judge her as her own candidate, in the present.”

Madison Sloat, a 19-year-old from Pittsburgh who has backed Hillary Clinton from the beginning, agreed. “It shouldn’t be an issue that impacts her at all. It makes me mad that he wants American citizens to blame Hillary for all of that.”

That attitude suits the former president fine. “He’s been making those attacks since the beginning of this campaign, so I don’t think there’s anything new,” Bill Clinton told reporters in Ohio. Days later, he sat silently in his wife’s VIP box, feet from the debate stage where Trump bellowed, “There’s never been anyone in the history of politics … so abusive to women.”

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Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP .

Bill Barrow, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Young voters not swayed by Bill Clinton’s history

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