Quote (kenw @ 6 Jul 2021 23:54)
Prognosis looks grim, but through God, all things are possible. The MSM, social media platforms and numerous schools are essentially indoctrination camps for the youth. This problem needs to be addressed by our White conservative politicians before it's too late. Don't think keyboard warrior'ing and freedom larping are effective.
-----
A new deep dive into the 2020 electorate by Pew Research contains mostly bad news for Republicans, whose approaching demographic doom is less racial than it is generational. While it shouldn't be news to anyone at this point that young voters are a solidly blue voting bloc, the more worrisome developments for the GOP are the unexpectedly elderly nature of the party's coalition and the unyielding Democratic lean of younger voters as they age. If Pew's numbers are to be believed, the only solidly Republican age demographic last year was 75 and over, meaning that every time the sun comes up, the GOP's struggle to win a majority of American voters gets harder.
(...)
But then there are the age numbers. Biden, predictably, obliterated Trump with the youngest voters – members of the so-called Generation Z, born after 1996, as well as younger millennials. Exit polls had Biden winning 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points, 60-36, whereas Pew pegs it at 58-38. Exit polls also showed Trump with just a 52-47 edge among voters over 65, and Pew's numbers came in almost identical – 52-48 for Trump over Biden.And if those were the only topline stats you saw, you wouldn't think there was a huge problem for Republicans.
But Pew also broke the survey down into not just age groups but generational cohorts. And it's here where you'll find the most terrifying information for the GOP. According to Pew, Trump won a decisive majority only with members of the "Silent Generation," those born between 1928 and 1945 (and the extremely tiny number of living people older than that). Trump dominated that cohort by 16 points, 58-42. That means that the only reliably Republican voter bloc will shrink considerably between now and 2024, and that 65- to 74-year-olds must have been a much more blue-leaning group in 2020 to produce Trump's comparatively narrow 4-point margin with all over-65s.
You don't need a degree in actuarial science to know that in general, 65- to 74-year-olds will be around considerably longer than 75- to 102-year-olds. According to the Social Security Administration, a 65-year-old man has a remaining life expectancy of almost 18 years. At 75, it's just over 11 years, and at 85 it's less than six. Members of the Silent Generation are expected to shrink from 9 percent of the voting eligible population in 2020 to 7 percent in 2024. And while I hope that my over-75 parents are around as long as humanly possible, if I were a GOP operative I would be apoplectically trying to figure out ways to make the age profile of the average party supporter substantially younger, rather than tripling down on whatever Fox-driven cultural hysteria is dominating headlines in the conservative media. This stuff is not resonating with anyone who has more than 30 years to live.
Perhaps even worse for former President Trump and his acolytes, the Pew data showedlittle erosion in the millennial preference for Democrats over Republicans. Fifty-six percent of millennials voted for Clinton in 2016, and 58 percent voted for Biden in 2020. Remember, the first millennials voted in 2002, and as a group they simply have not budged. "Elder millennials" are turning 40 this year and they don't love the Republican Party any more than they did when George W. Bush was lighting several trillion dollars on fire prosecuting a pointless war in Iraq. And that's terrible news for the GOP's hopes of ever becoming a majority party again, because if they keep losing the youngest voters by double digits election after election, they need a significant number of them to get more conservative as they age just to hold current margins in place.
The Emerging Democratic Majority II: Demographic Boogaloo
Democrats have been deluding themselves for over 20 years that they are on the verge of securing an imminent structural majority which will allow them to win election no matter how bad the candidates they nominate or how shitty the policies they pursue. Not gonna happen. It should also be noted that these "elderly millenials" were college-aged during the GWB years, and he was just a horrible fit for this age group. Trump in a septuagenarian who ran a boisterous campaign in 2016 and against an extremely difficult political environment in 2020. (A lot of the headwind he faced in 2020 came down to his own shortcomings, don't get me wrong...)
Concluding from what are essentially two data points that Republicans, or Republican policies, are structurally unable to appeal to younger voters is a real stretch if you ask me.