Will the Trump/GOP Alienation of Young Voters Be Fatal in 2020

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, one of the things that has most baffled me is the GOP - and Trump's - almost deliberate alienation of younger voters as they prostitute themselves in favor of aging, conservative white voters who are literally dying off (albeit, not fast enough to have reversed the 2016 presidential and 2018 Senate election results).  The goal of a political party is to elect candidates not just in the election cycle at hand, but also in the future. As a piece at CNN that looks at younger voter turn out and the growing percentage of the electorate that they comprise, it is hard to see the GOP long term having anything less than a political death wish much as what has happened to the GOP in California (something I would love to see come to pass).  Pandering to Christian extremists while near 40% of younger voters have walked away from religion is simply insane.  The same goes for the GOP's increasingly open racism in the face of an increasingly racial diverse cadre of younger voters.  Here are article highlights:

The sharp turn against the Republican Party by young people in the 2018 election may be only the overture to an even greater political risk for the GOP in 2020.

Both historical voting patterns and underlying demographic trends suggest that the biggest difference in the electorate between this election and the next one is that relatively younger voters will cast a greater share of the votes in the presidential year -- perhaps a much larger share. Even with much higher than usual turnout among young voters this year, voters 45 and below are likely to increase their proportion of the total vote from just under three-in-ten this year to something closer to four-in-ten by 2020, historical trends suggest.

A rising participation level could threaten Republicans at a moment when younger voters, who have consistently expressed preponderant opposition to President Donald Trump in polls, provided Democrats their largest margins in decades during last month's election.

"Voters under 45 moved decisively and overwhelmingly toward Democrats, and I don't know how you take it as anything other than a total rebuke of Trump and what's he done," says Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann, who has extensively studied younger voters.

Despite Democrats' emphatic gains among younger voters, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote, a book on the Millennial Generation, says the GOP shows no signs of grappling with the shift.

Several states with Democratic campaigns that particularly targeted young people saw bigger increases, according to previously unpublished Catalist data. In Arizona, the share of the vote cast by those under 45 spiked from 21% in 2014 to 29% this year; in Georgia, the numbers jumped from 29% to 36% ; Texas increased from 26% to 33%.

That raises the clear red flag for Republicans that the young people who broke decisively against the party last month are likely to comprise a measurably larger share of voters in 2020.

The most basic reason younger voters loom even larger in 2020 is that the millennial Generation and Generation X, joined for the first time by the post-millennials born after 2000, will comprise a larger share of the eligible voter pool than in 2016. (Those three generations represented about 55% of all eligible voters in 2016, and are expected to rise to about 63% in 2020, according to forecasts by the non-partisan States of Change project.)

Heightened turnout in 2020 would raise the price for the losses Republicans suffered among younger voters this year. In the exit polls, Democrats carried fully 67% of voters aged 18-29 in House elections. That represented their best performance among adults under 30 in any House election since at least 1986; it even exceeded their modern high points of around three-fifths in the 2006 midterm election and the 2008 and 2012 presidential years, when former President Barack Obama was on the ballot.

Similarly, exit polls this year found House Democrats captured 58% among voters aged 30-44. That's also the highest share of the vote Democrats have won in that age group since 1986.

These results were remarkably consistent across regional lines. Democrats carried voters aged 18-29 in all 22 Senate races in which an exit poll was conducted, except for Indiana, where the two candidates tied. Many of their margins among these youngest voters were enormous. In the US Senate race in Texas, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, despite losing the race, carried 71% of voters younger than 30, the exit polls found. Gavin Newsom won 69% of voters younger than 30 in winning the California governor's race, and Stacey Abrams carried just under two-thirds of them in her losing Georgia gubernatorial bid.

"When you look at these crosstabs, and you see just how poorly Republicans did among thirty-somethings, not just kids just out of college, it's a problem," she says. "They have kids, they bought houses, they pay taxes, they are doing all of those things that were supposed to make them Republicans, and they didn't become Republicans."
 To Anderson, the GOP's weakness with voters now in their thirties is evidence that the party's problem extends beyond Trump: as she notes, the roughly three-fifths of voters 30-44 that Democrats won in 2018 almost exactly equaled their showing among voters in their twenties during their sweep in the 2006 mid-term election. "The problem now for Republicans is you are not just talking about we need to do better with younger voters, now it has spread so far up the age scale as these voters have gotten older and not become more conservative in the process," she said.

[W]hile the GOP's difficulties with the Millennial Generation predate Trump, there seems little doubt that he has compounded them. From the outset, many millennials viewed Trump's belligerent language on race and immigration, and his belittling comments about women, as an explicit counterrevolution against the ideal of a more inclusive and tolerant America that most of them say they support. In a summer 2016 ABC/Washington Post survey, two thirds of voters under 40 said they considered Trump biased against women and minorities. But doubts about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton blocked the full expression of those doubts . . . 

In this [2018] election, Trump faced a withering verdict from younger voters. In the exit polls, 66% of voters aged 18-29 and 62% of those aged 30-44 said they disapproved of his performance in office. In each group, just over half said they strongly disapproved of Trump's performance, significantly more than the share of older voters (just over two-fifths) who said they were so strongly disenchanted with him.

But Trump is still committing the GOP to a strategy of squeezing more advantage from groups that are shrinking. All of the major data sources on the electorate's composition -- from the Census Bureau to the exit polls to Catalist -- agree that the share of the vote cast by Trump's core group of whites without a college education has been declining by about two percentage points over each four-year presidential cycle. With turnout among minorities and college-educated whites surging, Catalist's preliminary analysis found those working-class whites, while still the electorate's largest single group, dropped fully five points as a share of the vote this year, compared to the last mid-term in 2014.

One thing no political strategy can reverse is the tide of generational replacement. As not only the World War II and Silent Generations, but also more baby boomers pass out of the electorate, the share of the eligible voting pool comprised of Generation X, millennials and Post-millennials is inexorably rising. The States of Change project forecasts those three generations -- which are much more racially diverse and college-educated than the generations they are replacing -- will continue growing to about two-thirds of eligible voters by 2024 and nearly three-fourths by 2028. More voters mean more consequences if Republicans can't soften the recoil from the party that younger voters displayed last month.

As I said, the GOP is suffering from a long term death wish or suicide pact.