Millennial datapoints of the day

By Felix Salmon | October 9, 2014 | 6:15pm

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Fusion just published the results of its Massive Millennial Poll (we asked 1,200 likely American voters aged 18–34 a bunch of questions). Some of the findings are well worth sharing. Here are the top four which jump out at me:

1- White millennials are surprisingly dissatisfied with Barack Obama; blacks and hispanics are much more loyal.

Millennials skew Democratic (by a margin of 41% to just 28% Republican) and as a whole they’re happy with the president. But if you just look at whites, there’s a 60–40 split against Obama (who also lost the white national vote in the last election, among both men and women). To put it another way: while millennials in general are supporters of Obama, white millennials ultimately seem to be more white than millennial. Race trumps age.

2- This is not, at least by their own reckoning, the first generation to expect a lower standard of living than their parents

By a very large margin — some 40 percentage points — millennials still expect to be better off than their parents. This is a big surprise, and is also heartening.

3- The strongest support for same-sex marriage comes from Hispanics

It comes as no surprise to learn that millennials overwhelmingly support gay marriage. It is surprising, however, to see that Hispanic millennials are even more supportive of gay marriage than whites. The difference isn’t huge, and probably isn’t particularly statistically significant. But in a way this is the opposite of the white millennials supporting Obama: in this case, age trumps race. (Hispanics overall support gay marriage to a much lower degree.)

4- Even when they’re online, millennials still look to TV brands for news

The average age of a CNN viewer is just under 63 years old, but it still has astonishing strength online among a younger audience. It’s by far the most popular online news source among millennials, easily beating out Facebook and Huffington Post and Reddit and Twitter combined. Fox and BBC and ABC and MSN are all in the top 10 as well. This finding is so surprising, in fact, that it might be an artifact of the way the question was asked. But clearly the grand TV news brands still have a lot of brand equity among the younger generation.