Millennials Want to Send Troops to Fight ISIS, Poll Finds
— -- Young people today support sending ground troops for a military campaign against ISIS, as does the rest of the country, a new poll found.
Fifty-seven percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they supported "the United States sending ground troops to participate in a military campaign against the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL)," while 40 percent said they opposed it, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics' most recent poll of millennials, released today.
That's roughly the same rate at which Americans as a whole have told other pollsters they support sending U.S. troops to fight the militant group that has seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria, and against which the U.S. is currently engaged in a bombing campaign.
In a late-September ABC News/Washington Post survey, 53 percent of all respondents -- including all age groups -- said they backed sending U.S. troops to fight ISIS. In a February CBS poll, 57 percent said they backed sending troops.
Despite anti-war protests on college campuses over the decades, this isn't the first time young people have backed war. In October 2002, during the run-up to the second Gulf War, Pew found that 18-to-29-year-olds backed invading Iraq at a higher clip than other age groups: 69 percent, as opposed to 61 percent for 50-to-64-year-olds and 51 percent among respondents over 65.
