A majority of young adults – 57% – see Donald Trump’s presidency as illegitimate, including about three-quarters of blacks and large majorities of Latinos and Asians, a new poll has found.

GenForward is a poll of adults age 18 to 30 conducted by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

A slim majority of young whites in the poll, 53%, consider Trump a legitimate president, but even among that group 55% disapprove of the job he’s doing, according to the survey.

“That’s who we voted for. And obviously America wanted him more than Hillary Clinton,” said Rebecca Gallardo, a 30-year-old nursing student from Kansas City, Missouri, who voted for Trump.

Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots but Trump won the presidency in the electoral college.

Trump’s legitimacy as president was questioned earlier this year by Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who said: “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”

Trump routinely denies that and says he captured the presidency in large part by winning states such as Michigan and Wisconsin that Clinton may have taken for granted.

Overall, just 22% of young adults approve of the job he is doing as president, while 62% disapprove.

One respondent to the poll, Jermaine Anderson, said he kept going back to the same memory of Trump, then a candidate, referring to some Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers.

“You can’t be saying that [if] you’re the president,” said Anderson, a 21-year-old student from Coconut Creek, Florida.

Trump’s rhetoric as a candidate and his presidential decisions have done much to keep the question of who belongs in America leading the news, though he is struggling to accomplish some key goals.

Powered by supporters chanting “build the wall”, Trump has vowed to erect a barrier along the southern US border and make Mexico pay for it, which Mexico refuses to do. Federal judges in three states have blocked Trump’s executive orders to ban travel to the US from seven, then six majority-Muslim nations.

In Honolulu, US district judge Derrick Watson this week cited “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus” behind the travel ban, citing Trump’s own words calling for “a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.

Trump is the leader of a country where by around 2020 half of children will be part of a minority race or ethnic group, the Census Bureau projects. Non-Hispanic whites are expected to be a minority by 2044.



“I’m thinking, he’s saying that most of the people in the world who are raping and killing people are the immigrants. That’s not true,” said Anderson, whose parents are from Jamaica.



Megan Desrochers, a 21-year-old student from Lansing, Michigan, said her sense of Trump’s illegitimacy was more about why he was elected.

“I just think it was kind of a situation where he was voted in based on his celebrity status verses his ethics,” she said, adding that she was not necessarily against Trump’s immigration policies.

Poll participants said in interviews that they did not necessarily vote for one party’s candidates over another’s, a prominent tendency among young Americans, experts say. And in the survey, neither party fares especially strongly.

Just a quarter of young Americans had a favorable view of the Republican party, and six in 10 had an unfavorable view. Majorities of young people across racial and ethnic lines held negative views of the GOP.

The Democratic party performed better, but views were not overwhelmingly positive. Young people were more likely to have a favorable than an unfavorable view of the Democratic party by a 47% to 36% margin. But just 14% said they had a strongly favorable view of the Democrats.

Views of the Democratic party were most favorable among young people of color. Roughly six in 10 blacks, Asians and Latinos held positive views of the party. Young whites were somewhat more likely to have unfavorable than favorable views, 47% to 39%.

As for Trump, eight in 10 young people thought he was doing poorly in terms of the policies he has put forward and seven in 10 had negative views of his presidential demeanor.

“I do not like him as a person,” said Gallardo of Trump. She nonetheless voted for Trump because she didn’t trust Clinton.

“I felt like there wasn’t much choice,” she said.