Posted on 05/18/2015 2:00:46 AM PDT by Cronos
It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.
There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.
The party’s core is dying off by the day.
Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Based on what I see in my own family this article is spot on. The Xers/Millenials in my family are all liberal and FEEL, the key word there, that republicans are just angry old, white males and want nothing to do with them. These kids all have god jobs, kids of their own and own houses. They are not living in someone’s basement. They all voted for Obama and are excited about electing the first woman president, who in their minds means Hillary.
We may not like it, but they have been well taught by the public schools and have it reinforced daily by the media.
Clinton - 69 years old
Do we? Pass on our beliefs that is.
Then we send our children to public schools, where we learn that the left reproduces by stealing other people's children. That's why so many of them choose careers in education.
If you look closely you’ll find that Xers/Millenials are Liberal on social tolerance issues, but also have an enormous distrust of big govenment authoritarianism.
IOW they’re more Libertarian than either Liberal or Conservative. But could be pushed (dare I say “nudged”?) into voting Conservative if the right kind of anti-statist appeal is made to them.
Which is where we need to go. Not by surrendering Conservative values and ideals but by winning the younger vote through appeals on issues we have much more common ground with them on than Liberals do.
THEY WISH IT.
What they are actually trying to do is convince Republicans that they need to support AMNESTY to replace their old voters.
But not true. The DEMOCRATS are the ones losing their voters now, thankfully. These are the FDR/JFK/Union types that live respectable, honest, moral, conservative lives (in fact, virtually every one married an opposite-sex partner). Yet they TOTALLY DESPISE Republicans, so they vote Democrat in every damn election and could care less regarding just how far left the Democrats have moved. They live as Republicans, pay taxes, hate high taxes, but they are TOTALLY BRAINWASHED when it comes to who to vote for - it just has to do with how they grew up.
They are dying off quickly now (thank God) and the Americans replacing them have no allegiance to either party, but they don’t like government screwing them either. So when government essentially tells them that they have to live lower-class lifestyles so that our colleges can “look more like America” they get mad and are open to voting our way. When they learn that the Democrats are taking the lead in establishing a surveillance state, they also get mad about it. When they get told that it’s the Democrats that require them to buy overpriced health insurance because they need to subsidize the lazy bums that choose not to work (me included, once I retire and make sure my ‘income’ is just the right level, LOL), they get mad about it and are open to voting our way.
No, the REAL FEAR is on the left. Their ability to be competitive for the White Vote pretty much goes away once these people go away. All that the Republicans have to figure out is that they need to give today’s white voters something to vote for, as they did in Texas and throughout the South in 2014 (hence my FR “About” page, and tag-line).
“GOP opponents have been (wishfully) predicting the extinction of the Republican party since its founding in 1854. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
...and trolls. They predicted our demise in Texas in 2014 with that Wendy Davis character. Instead we got nearly HALF OF THE HISPANIC VOTE and 75% of the white vote, and won every damn statewide race by 20 points.
legs ?
This article is the lead headline article at Huffing Puffing Post...
Then we agree completely. Cutting government spending and cutting taxes will have exactly the effect you're talking about.
I have seven grandchildren.....all are conservative...not necessarily Republican!!!
Anecdotally speaking here, but my wife’s family are all good Irishcatholicdemocrats (one word) living in/around Louisville KY.
But at Xmas I was talking to her 20-something cousins and several of them, all young women btw, quietly admitted to me (one of a couple token Conservatives who married in) that they couldnt pull the lever for Grmes and voted instead for McConnell. Because of Obamacare, the economy, being tired of identity politics, etc.
Not to be intended as promoting McConnel and his RINOism, but them telling me that does sync nicely with him blowing out Grimes by 15% in what was supposed to be a neck-and-neck race.
The younger generations are actually fed up with BOTH parties, governmemt overreach and the political system in general. Which the Democrats are much more heavily invested in.
So the opening to these voters is there ...
I guess that is why the dems are running a young candidate for president!!!
I hear what you are saying, but in my family at least the social issues trump everything else. They are all about fairness, and that means equality of outcome not opportunity.
Death isn’t killing the Republican Party off, their leaders are doing it with no spine, no morals, no anything other than an attitude of, me-too to whatever the Democrats want only we can do it cheaper and better.
If the Republicans think they are going to beat socialist/communist Democrats by promising the same crap only on the cheap they are headed for the ash heap of history as a party and pretty damned quick.
But,
1) People get more conservative as they get older (read: “acquire life experience and wisdom”).
2) Young liberals keep throwing their offspring into dumpsters, reducing their generational impact.
Well as long as they continue to act like Rats, good riddance!
Unfortunately, many of us don’t pass on our beliefs. But as to actual numbers, I can’t begin to tell you.
All I can say is that my husband and I definitely did. I think my three children are more conservative than I, they argue their positions well, married godly, conservative spouses and are passing their beliefs onto their children.
My lib sister and her husband = no children. And they can’t last in a discussion with my kids.
PRECISELY...good example.
Today’s elderly Democrat voters are voting for the Democrat Party of 40 to 50 years ago. They have an amazing ability to TOTALLY SHUT OUT who the Democrats are now and what they stand for.
The people you mention don’t have that brainwashing, despite the non-stop attempts by the left, particularly in our public schools. They do hate both parties, for differing reasons, but that also means they are not the one-for-one replacements for the Democrats that are dying off in big numbers now
It’s the reason, I’m convinced, that we’re seeing mass histrionics by the Progressive/Democrat establishment right now. We’re at a confluence of tipping points; one where the policies they’ve always wanted can be cemented, another where the public support they need to make it happen is on the verge of evaporating.
Case in point is Global Warming. Ok, let’s assume that it IS caused by humans and IS reversable. The younger generations will support all sorts of measures to combat it. Right up until the point where they’re told that as a result the price of electricity will skyrocket (necessarily) to where it’ll cost them dollars per minute to run (recharge) their iPhones.
At that point the Warmunists lose them.
Same thing with a whole host of other issues that involve the younger generations being informed, bluntly, what their “fair share” of the costs happen to be.
Correct analysis and proper approach.
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