Blame Game Erupts Over GOP’s Decline in Youth Vote

Even if one puts aside the toxicity of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has little to offer younger voters who are much more racial diverse that the far right elderly and who are concerned about issues that the GOP continues to pretend are not problems: climate change, racial inequality, homophobia, religious based intolerance and bigotry and, of course wealthy inequality which the GOP has only made worse. Thus, it is little surprise that the 2020 election showed the GOP and Trump losing ground with younger voters, including in key swing states that Trump lost. Within the GOP the blame game is raging even as no one within the party wants to look at the ultimate source of the decline in younger voters opting to support the GOP: younger voters simply don't want what the GOP is peddling.  A piece in Politico looks at the finger pointing game which will do nothing to fix the true underlying problem.  Here are article highlights:

Nobody involved in Donald Trump’s reelection thought the president would win the youth vote in 2020. But they didn’t think it would be this bad.  Now the finger pointing has begun.

In nearly every Midwestern battleground state that mattered to Trump’s reelection, the president performed worse among young voters than in 2016, according to a POLITICO review of state exit polls. Trump ceded ground in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two states he lost. He also regressed in Arizona, another critical state that slipped away.

In Pennsylvania, President-elect Joe Biden won young voters by a 20-point margin, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 9-point advantage in 2016. In Wisconsin, Biden won the state’s youngest voters by a 16-point margin, a dramatic rise from Clinton’s razor-thin edge in 2016 — and a significant swing in a state Trump only lost by 20,000 votes. Michigan saw a four-point shift from 2016 to 2020.

To Trump’s critics, Biden gained ground with young voters because of who his opponent was: a divisive politician with a culture wars playbook that failed to energize audiences outside of his base. But among the president’s campaign aides and allies, the consensus is far less clear. Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in Trump’s 2020 operation revealed rifts, acrimony and a system in which no one would take the blame but everyone had a scapegoat — from the president himself, to the campaign to outside groups like Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative campus organizing group.

The fallout has left the GOP with a dearth of insight into what went wrong with millennial and Gen Z voters — particularly in a cycle where Trump saw gains with other demographics — and no clear strategy to prevent another surge of youth support for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. And the Republican Party is desperately in need of a strategy to reverse the trend, having struggled for decades to connect with younger voters.

“The Republican party has no future if it doesn’t improve its performance among younger voters,” said Michael Steel, a GOP strategist and former top aide to House Speaker John Boehner.

“I’m not a fan of top-down autopsy processes,” Steel added, “but I do hope the end of the Trump presidency is a natural inflection point and a time to reboot to some extent.”

Some Republican operatives involved in the 2020 cycle said the way young voters, who skew heavily Democratic, currently perceive the GOP will automatically improve once Trump is no longer in office.

They said the president’s inflammatory approach to issues like race relations, which became a major cultural flashpoint this summer, likely cost the party the support of young conservatives who may have been on the fence about supporting Trump and are less ideologically rigid than their older counterparts on such topics.

[T]wo Trump campaign aides who have worked closely with Kirk said the campaign had its own youth outreach efforts that went beyond voters who are still in college. These aides described Turning Point’s messaging as too sycophantic to bring in young voters who might align more closely with conservatism but remain apprehensive about Trump himself.

In the end, Trump saw a decline in his youth support from four years ago in Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and several other states. Only Georgia and Michigan saw a slight increase in Trump voters under the age of 29 — from 33 percent in 2016 to 39 percent this cycle in Georgia, and 34 percent to 35 percent in Michigan, according to exit poll data. But the gains were not enough to put either state in the president’s column.