The Republican Dilemma

Perusing the Internet today, I came across this very well thought out article assessing the problems facing the Republican party over the loss of younger voters. I often read some of the Republican and conservative sights just to see what their take on current events is. Of course I have to ignore the ridiculous rants to get to anything substantive but it's worth it. I figure if I can put up with some of the crazy left rants, I can put up with the crazy right ones too.

I've been troubled in recent months when discussing the issue of young voters with some fellow Republicans. There seems to be a sort of conventional wisdom that we should expect young voters to trend liberal and Democratic, that the behavior of young voters in 2008 is not serious cause for concern. This stems from a belief in partisanship as a life-cycle factor, that voters start liberal and Democratic and wind up older, conservative, and Republican. But the data paint a very different picture.

Take the graph of partisan identification for instance; over the last few decades, young voters have not identified with the Democratic party in substantially higher numbers than voters overall. Even conservatism had its moment among young voters in the 1980's. Yet with the end of the Reagan presidency, young voters shifted toward liberalism. This ideological shift did not play out into actual partisan identification in a meaningful way until 2006 and 2008.

Even the comments were interesting. Here's one of many that I liked...

It's not hard to figure out
It's easy to see the GOP's problems.

Party mantra:

1. We don't like gays
2. We don't like immigrants
3. We think Obama is a tyrannical fascist communist dictator
4. We don't like Muslims WAIT, who DO we like besides southern white straight
people who love guns and hate gays, immigrants, and muslims(e.g. Obama)?

We also don't care about the plight of those college students who finish
college under tremendous debt after graduating to enter a terrible jobs
market.

Pretty simple.