IT IS hard to know whether Hillary Clinton should be cheered by the lightning visit that she paid on September 19th to Temple University, a large, publicly funded college in Philadelphia—or plunged into gloom. On the upside for Team Clinton, it was easy to find students won over by her half-hour speech, a strikingly personal appeal to young voters that painted Donald Trump as a bigot and herself as a lifelong advocate for progressive causes. The candidate pandered on policies, but also sought to recruit the young as partners in a mission to fix the country. “I need you”, Mrs Clinton pleaded at one point, adding a promise that “young people will always have a seat at any table where any decision is being made”—a pledge which, depending on how the Clinton White House defines the meaning of “young”, “seat” and “at”, should enliven meetings with the joint chiefs of staff.

One convert was Michelle Ferguson, a 20-year-old linguistics major who, like many Temple students, backed Mrs Clinton’s leftist rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, during the Democratic presidential primary. “She earned my vote today,” Ms Ferguson enthused as she left the Clinton rally, held in a hall with room for just 300 students, decorated with campaign placards bearing the artful slogan “Love trumps hate”, and an array of large red letters simply saying: “Love”. What won over Ms Ferguson was hearing Mrs Clinton recall her youth as an activist, whether campaigning for boys imprisoned in adult jails in South Carolina, or urging schools to build wheelchair ramps. The undergraduate was taken aback to hear Mrs Clinton recall her reluctance to run as a senator for New York, because the former First Lady thought of herself as “an advocate, not a politician”. Ms Ferguson called that “really inspiring”, because she is an activist herself, and had always been unsure whether Mrs Clinton shared her values or was merely driven by ambition.

On the downside for Team Clinton, it is dauntingly late to be making such conversions. Less than two months before the general election, Mrs Clinton remains unloved by many young Americans who came of age around the year 2000 or later (earning them the demographic label millennials). When pollsters offer young people a four-way choice between Mrs Clinton, Mr Trump and casting protest votes for the Libertarian and Green Party candidates, as few as 31% of them have backed the Democrat in some recent polls. That the young dislike Mr Trump still more, handing him as little as a quarter of their votes in those same four-way surveys, offers scant comfort. In 2008 and 2012 President Barack Obama did not just win 60% or more of votes cast by millennials, he prodded record-breaking numbers of the young to turn out. That not only made the electorate youthful, but more diverse too—because younger Americans are less likely to be white. In 2016, given Mr Trump’s thumping leads among older voters and among white voters, Mrs Clinton can ill-afford to leave millennials feeling “meh”.

To hear Mrs Clinton described by many students, she sounds less like a working politician than a figure from history, ready to be cast in bronze or engraved on a postage stamp. The Democrat does not excite the young because “God bless her, she’s been around for ever,” suggested Conor Freeley, a Temple student and Democratic activist volunteering at her rally. A former Sanders-backer, Mr Freeley is now working hard to register voters on his overwhelmingly Democratic campus. Complicating his task, classmates raise qualms about Mrs Clinton’s character—meaning her honesty—more often than her policies, while her status as the first woman nominee of a major party is “absolutely taken for granted”. Another student at the speech, Tom Sacino, lamented that many of his friends want nothing to do with this election: “They say: Trump’s a racist, and Hillary’s a liar.”

Mrs Clinton finds herself in the painful position of being at once tiresomely familiar to many younger voters, and yet mysterious to them. A Clinton campaign bigwig, watching the Temple speech from the back of the room, noted polls showing that a “not insignificant percentage of millennial voters” see no real difference between Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton on climate change. “That’s not true, he thinks climate change is a hoax,” the bigwig growled, predicting “a lot of work” to educate young voters. In her speech Mrs Clinton duly recited something like a progressive credo. Her promises included new gun-safety laws, tackling the “soaring cost of college” with advice from Mr Sanders, a higher minimum wage, cheaper child-care and a big push on renewable energy: all issues that millennials say are important in polls.

Bernie’s harvest

In campaign appearances, Mr Obama has chided the young to remember “all the work” that Mrs Clinton has done over the years and the obstacles that she has overcome. Mr Sanders has spoken on college campuses in swing states, and urged his admirers to defeat Mr Trump by backing Mrs Clinton—the woman he painted for so long as an unprincipled agent of the billionaire classes. Until a few days ago such appeals to pragmatism pained Laurana Seymour, a student of English and political science who co-founded “Temple Students for Bernie Sanders” during the presidential primary. She says that during the primary Mr Sanders “clarified” why she dislikes Mrs Clinton, with his scathing attacks on his rival for giving paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, a bank, for backing free-trade deals and supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ms Seymour was reluctant to hear Mr Sanders in his new role on the general-election trail, explaining: “I didn’t want to be scared into voting for Clinton.” But now she will “most likely” vote for Mrs Clinton. She blames headlines predicting that Pennsylvania could be the state that decides the election, and the nastiness of the Trump campaign. In short, she has been scared into a Clinton vote. That is hardly an uplifting way to win over the young. In a brutal election season, it may have to do.