President Vladimir Putin’s support among young voters has roughly halved in the past year, according to independent survey results released Thursday, The Moscow Times reports.
If 36% of voters aged 18-24 said they would cast their ballots for Putin in 2019, only 20% expressed the same intention in November 2020, the Levada Center polling agency said.
While sociologists have observed Putin’s support among young Russians tailing off in the past two years, the trend has intensified in recent months, the Open Media news outlet quoted Levada deputy director Denis Volkov as saying.
Across all age groups, 39% of respondents in 2020 told Levada they would vote for Putin if elections were held on the nearest Sunday. These results stayed relatively stable from 2019, when 38% said they would vote for Putin.
After Putin, 24% of all respondents said they would not have voted and 16% said they had no preferred candidate.
Other age groups either increased or maintained their voting preferences for Putin, who has been in power for 20 years and has the authority to stay for 12 more under newly passed constitutional reforms.
Levada polled 1,607 Russians over the age of 18 in person across 50 federal subjects on Nov. 19-26.
