Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The GOP is seriously screwed

Not that we didn't know that, but the numbers Jon Walker of Firedoglake highlights here are pretty shocking:
Walker:
For decades young adults have tended to lean slightly Democratic but now the preference is overwhelming. Democrats have an unbelievable 18 point advantage among the current youngest generation. This is unlike anything in the past 20 years.
This is the dynamic that is going to dominate politics in the coming years. On many issues Millennials  are dramatically to the left of the rest of the American public. The generation is often even more progressive than self-identified “Liberals.”
This is why there is serious concern among GOP elites, but nothing is going to change until their base starts to die off. They aren't going to change who they are, and for the next 20-30 years they're going to drag the entire Republican party down with them. Couldn't happen to nicer people.

7 comments:

  1. That's a pretty big swing in the millennial numbers from a decade ago.

    ... Then again, a decade ago I couldn't vote, so no one gave a damn about my party identification.
    Do you think the swing is due to the tail end of Gen Y coming into the age range of the survey over the last decade (and being overwhelmingly blue), or because of changes in the Republican party/brand (i.e. the tea party movement)?

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  2. Little of column A and a little of column B. Also, I think you have to consider the ramifications of youth unemployment. The GOP is cutting benefits including UI and aren't for raising the minimum wage, which should scare the crap out of the under- and unemployed, many of whom are young people.

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    1. Well, for me personally, cutting things like unemployment is secondary to cutting science funding (the NIH, specifically).
      Because I need a job, and the number of those that I would actually want is positively correlated with federal funding for biomedical research. Which just got cut in the sequester. Right before I graduate.
      So before I get to considering that the GOP is making it worse to be unemployed, it mostly strikes me that they are rather directly making it more likely that I will be unemployed... the jerks.

      Of course, those two things also mix poorly.

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  3. We grew up in an era of almost unrivaled economic growth during the Clinton years, and then watched the GOP totally destroy the economic world we were raised to expect just as we started to enter the workforce. Some of the few saving graces for our early working years have been Dem-branded programs like food stamps, unemployment benefits and the stimulus package – and because we've actually had to use those programs, they aren't a mystified thing that only other people get to take advantage of.

    Because the people doing the fighting and the dying were our age, our generation was also more personally affected by two incredibly long, divisive and destructive wars that were fully owned by the Republican party (unlike Vietnam, in which both parties shared responsibility). Literally millions of us saw friends come back scarred from their experiences, and even if you believed in the cause, that makes the cost of war deeply real. It was harder for us to stomach the mismanagement and misplaced triumphalism of the Bush years, and ongoing Republican warmongering is an ongoing turnoff.

    All of that might have been forgivable if the party had distanced themselves from the policies that caused these disasters, but they decided instead to adopt a strategy of repellent obstructionism to even basic government function, let alone real change, and double down on outdated racist, sexist and bigoted social positions that we tend to find repulsive.

    I'd understand the impulse of someone from our generation to become a young libertarian (or even a survivalist!) under those conditions, but a Republican?

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  4. I agree with just about everything that's said here, and I'm really not sure what the defining factor is.

    One major thing that I think plays a role is the culture war stuff. The modern GOP has fully embraced policies of bigotry with gays, has allowed outward racism to exist among their members specifically in response to Obama, and has rather openly spoken about wanting to get rid of birth control (abortion too, but BC is about as widely popular as it gets).

    I feel like there are people who would be open to right wing economic ideas in our generation who just won't give the time of day to a party that believes in such backwards views on those issues. Their backwards views on these issues isn't changing any time soon, either. Those divides are only going to get worse until enough of that GOP base dies and they are forced to find new sources of political power.

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  5. This does sort of sum things up. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/coca-cola-super-bowl-ad-america-the-beautiful-conservatives-boycott

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    Replies
    1. Next up, baseball is socialist, and apple pie is for terrorists.

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