Millennials Prepare to Destroy GOP

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republican Party in its current incarnation that is dominated by religious extremism, racism, greed and bigotry needs to be destroyed.  The GOP has simply become something incredibly ugly and it all traces, in my view, to the rise of the Christofascists within the Party.  This element despite it feigned piety is comprised of people who simply are not nice and decent.  Sadly, they see others as things rather than living, breathing human beings and display a callousness towards others that is reminiscent of the way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews of Europe.  Thankfully, a new study by the Pew Research group suggests that the Milennial generation may be poised to destroy today's GOP.   Here are highlights from the Daily Kos:

Millennials (those born roughly since 1980 or so, depending on your definition) are the most progressive generation since FDR.

That's the headline from this fascinating infographic from Pew, which examines the voting preferences of various generational cohorts over the last two decades.  We've heard this before of course.  Pew grouped voters into categories not based solely on birth year, but also on the year in which a voter turned 18 -- noting under what President this occurred (fascinating concept).  They then looked across the last 10 elections to see where deviations from the national average occurred.

Takeways --

1) The obvious lede -- every election Millennials have voted in, they've skewed Democratic. Almost as important?  Ditto for young Gen Xers (who turned 18 under Clinton) -- in every election except 2004 (when they skewed GOP) and 2000 (when they tracked with national averages), they skew Democratic as well.  

2) Millennials and young Gen Xers deviated from the norm in 11 of 12 opportunities.

3) . . . . the Clinton group (today age 30-37) skewed Democratic in 5 of 7 elections and skewed Republican in only one.  Powerful argument that this is the fault line: voters age 37 and younger, vs. those 38 and older.  Not Gen X vs. Millennial.  Everyone born after Star Wars came out is basically a Democrat.

4) The idea that young, idealistic, naive voters tend to side with progressives until they age into mature, worldly realists and start voting for conservatives seems to be (at least partially) debunked by this chart.  Only the Reagan/Bush Gen Xers exhibit anything like this behavior.  Other groups were either a) more consistent over time, or b) inconsistent but in unpredictable ways, not just "older = more conservative."

In short, this chart seems to confirm much of what we've been talking about for years -- Millennials seem to consistently prefer progressive ideals, and predictably vote for Democratic candidates that (theoretically) espouse those ideals.  This is not changing, and it's a bit of an historical aberration.

If you were a Republican strategist, this is just more heartburn.

Yet despite this demographic reality, the GOP continues to pander increasingly to an aging voter pool that is literally dying off.  And in the process, the GOP is alienating the younger generations that are repulsed by the GOP's racism, homophobia and rejection of modernity.  Long term, it is political suicide.  But then, of course, the Christofascists are utterly detached from reality, so perhaps this phenomenon should be no surprise.