Young Voters Keep Moving to the Left on Social Issues

In other good news - unless one is a Christofascist or an older Republican - are findings that among the younger generations, voters are moving to the left on social issues and rejecting the ignorance and bigotry that defines the political and social right.   Better yet, even young Republicans are moving away from the dogma of their elders making it increasingly difficult for Christofascists to inflict their hate and bigotry on society.  The other good news found by the Pew Research survey is that Donald Trump is accelerating the exodus of younger generations from the GOP.  For years I have been arguing that the GOP has placed short term gain ahead of a long term strategy, hoping that disenfranchising voters and gerrymandering districts would compensate for policies viewed as toxic by growing numbers of Americans, especially the younger generations. As the older racists and religious extremist so important to the GOP die off, there simply will not be enough voters to replace them.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on the survey findings:

As a self-described political conservative, Reagan Larson might seem to be a natural fit for the Republican Party. The 19-year-old college student from South Dakota grew up in a Catholic household that objected to same-sex marriage, and she remains firmly opposed to abortion.

But in many ways, that is where the ideological similarities end. Ms. Larson, a dual major in biology and Spanish at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., does not oppose the legalization of marriage equality. She views climate change as undeniable, believes “immigrants make our country richer,” and disagrees with her parents on the need for a border wall.

Ms. Larson is part of Generation Z, one of the most ethnically diverse and progressive age groups in American history. People born after 1996 tend to espouse similar views to the age cohort just ahead of them, the Millennials, but they are far more open to social change than older generations have been, according to the findings of a new report by the Pew Research Center. The findings mark a shift that could substantially reshape the nation’s political and economic landscape. [O]nly 30 percent of Generation Z respondents said they approved of President Trump’s performance; more than half believed humans were fueling climate change; and 70 percent said they wanted the government to do more to solve the nation’s problems. Those views roughly mirror attitudes held by Millennials, and together, the two age groups may add up to a powerful voting bloc at odds with Republican orthodoxy, political scientists say. “This should be an alert to the Republican Party as they think about generational replacement,” said Elizabeth Bennion, a professor of political science at Indiana University South Bend.

Each succeeding generation of Americans tends to be more progressive than those that came before, Ms. Bennion noted, a trend that potentially poses a long-term threat to the Republican Party’s power.

“If there isn’t a will to change within the party,” she said, “it could become permanently in the minority moving forward.”

Democrats of all ages tend to align fairly closely on major social and political issues, but the report highlights a sharp generational divide among Republicans. For example, more than half of the youngest Republicans surveyed said that racial and ethnic diversity was good for American society . . . . Young Republicans are also more likely to approve of same-sex marriage and accept transgender people.

Michael Schaefer, 18, a politically conservative college freshman from Youngstown, Ohio, said he was in the sixth grade when some classmates came out as gay, and had a number of transgender students as friends in high school.  “For over half my life, I’ve been shown the other side of sexuality and gender,” he said. “I don’t care about their sex or gender, I just care about the individual.”

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Americans’ political and social views do not tend to drift to the right as they age, according to Kim Parker, who oversees research into social demographic trends at the Pew Research Center.

“The differences we see across age groups have more to do with the unique historical circumstances in which they come of age,” she said, noting that demographers have not seen a generational pattern of growing more conservative or more Republican over time.

The Republican Party has lost younger Americans like Travis Gaither, though, as it has moved farther to the right on issues like immigration, gun control and climate change.

Mr. Gaither, who grew up in Tennessee, described his parents as “typical southern white Republicans” who belong to two country clubs and are active in the Chamber of Commerce. But Mr. Gaither, 20, was chairman of the High School Democrats of Tennessee during his senior year, a political transformation fueled by his liberal social views and cemented by his outrage over Mr. Trump’s hard-line policies.

The Pew study found that two-thirds of Mr. Gaither’s generation believe, as he does, that black people are treated less fairly than whites in the United States.

“I feel like I’ve moved toward the left, as the Republican Party has shifted toward the right,” he said.

Good!  Let's hope the phenomenon accelerates and that the GOP goes the way of the Whigs sooner as opposed to later.

The Shortsighted GOP Push for Kavanaugh

As I have often noted, for eight (8) years I was a precinct chair member of the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  I even filed the articles incorporating the body with the State Corporation Commission.  Back in those days, part of the Party agenda was planning for the long term future of the Party.  Those days are long gone and now, perceived short term expediency trumps all else - no pun intended - and there seems to be no thought of what short term actions may trigger in the long term.   The trend began back shortly before I resigned from the GOP when Christofascists were voted onto local city and county committees with the short term view of rallying "conservative Christians" to support the Party.  Since then, white supremacists have been welcomed in and, in the figure of Brett Kavanaugh, anti-women misogynists have been welcomed to the GOP fold.  Meanwhile, the younger voters, Hispanics, college educated voters and minorities - the growing segments of the electorate - have been driven into the arms of the Democrats.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the long term repercussions Republicans may suffer if the ram through Kavanaugh's confirmation.  Here are excerpts:

By refusing to call other witnesses, or enlist the FBI in a fact-finding investigation, or summon relevant witnesses, Senate Republicans have systematically steered the hearing into a cul-de-sac of competing memories between Ford and Kavanaugh. The plan to vote on the nomination within days gives away the game: No one would schedule votes that quickly if they were committed to fully evaluating whatever testimony Ford provides on Thursday, much less the other charges confronting Kavanaugh.

The allegations from Avenatti’s client, Julie Swetnick, could scramble Republicans’ decision making. But even if the Senate pushes forward and confirms Kavanaugh, the battle over his selection is virtually guaranteed to continue. Indeed, it’s already possible to identify at least four distinct rounds of future electoral and legislative conflict over Kavanaugh if he’s confirmed.

The 2018 election: The Kavanaugh controversy erupted as polls were already showing a threat to GOP candidates this fall, in the form of an intense backlash against Donald Trump that’s fueling unprecedented deficits among college-educated white women and energized turnout among African American women. Democrats have positioned themselves to benefit from that energy by nominating a record number of women in House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections.

Republicans have feared that if they don’t confirm Kavanaugh, they will depress turnout among their base supporters. But elevating him to the Supreme Court amid these allegations risks compounding their problems with the female voters already most hostile to Trump (partly for his own history of alleged sexual abuse). Even before Ford testifies, nearly three-fifths of college-educated white women opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation in a recent Fox News poll. . . . The fierce recoil from Trump among college-educated white women is the single greatest source of Republican vulnerability in House races this year; if the party’s defenses among blue-collar white women also crack, a difficult election night could turn disastrous.

A House investigation: Democrats frustrated that Republicans have refused to fully investigate the allegations against Kavanaugh—or examine evidence suggesting that he provided false or misleading testimony on multiple issues in previous confirmation hearings—would get another chance to revisit those questions if the party wins the House majority in November. Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a Democratic group that advocates on judicial nominations, says he is “100 percent certain” a Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee “would seek to reopen investigations that Republicans during this process have refused to conduct.” . . . at the very least, Kavanaugh could face a more searching examination than Senate Republicans have conducted if he’s confirmed.

The 2020 election: Republicans expect Kavanaugh to tip the Court’s balance by providing a more reliably conservative vote than Anthony Kennedy, the justice he would replace. The paradox is that the more a Justice Kavanaugh would fulfill these expectations, the more he would renew the animosity over his confirmation. “It won’t just be something that will be easily forgotten, because you will have decisions coming out that he will be the fifth vote for,” Fallon notes. The clouds shadowing Kavanaugh would intensify the backlash on the left if he were to provide decisive votes on contentious issues. That would potentially raise the Court’s relevance in the 2020 presidential election, particularly if the legal right to abortion is rescinded or hollowed out by five male, Republican-appointed justices, two of whom (Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas) have been accused of sexual misconduct.

After 2020: If Kavanaugh is confirmed, he will cement a Republican-appointed Court majority whose oldest member (Thomas) is only 70. That means, health permitting, the majority could function into the 2030s as a barricade against Democratic priorities, such as strengthening environmental regulation, protecting voting rights, or expanding civil-rights protections around race, gender, and sexual orientation.

If Democrats regain unified control of the White House and Congress in 2020 or thereafter, that prospect could inspire the first serious effort to enlarge the Court’s membership since Franklin D. Roosevelt tried and failed in his second term. Lingering resentment over the GOP’s refusal to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Court under former President Barack Obama has already spurred discussion about a future effort to add more justices, which Congress can do without a constitutional amendment. It won’t ever be easy to pass legislation changing the Court’s structure. But the hardening Democratic belief that Kavanaugh’s nomination was tainted could increase pressure to explore the option in the years ahead if he is confirmed.

As to Lindsey Graham's bizarre behavior in supporting Kavanaugh, my comment is as follows:  I wish Graham would come "out of the closet" so that Trump or whoever in the GOP could no longer blackmail him. 

The Republican Self-Inflicted Dilemma

While I feel despair at times over the damage being done to the country by the Trump/Pence regime and Vichy Republicans, I also take some cynical glee in watching many Republicans twisting on a rope of their own creation as they pander to Trump voters in the party base in order to avoid primary challenges while at the same time alienating moderate and many swing voters.  The entire process started when Christofascists and thinly veiled white supremacists were voted on to local city and county committees with the foolish idea that moderates could control these toxic individuals and the agendas they pushed.   Instead, the deplorable hijacked the party grass roots and sane and rational people fled the GOP in droves, I and my entire extended family included.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Republican self-created dilemma.  Here are excerpts:

CARTERSVILLE, Ga.—Several miles off Route 41 in Bartow County, Georgia, is the downtown area of Cartersville. It's a throwback place with brick-face storefronts, independently owned businesses, and railroad tracks that bring freight trains straight through the center of the town every 30 minutes.

Here, the firing of James Comey arouses not support or opposition, but rather, indifference. Nobody I spoke with cared either way; it doesn't affect them or their families. People shrugged when asked about Trump's tweetstorms. Most agreed that press treatment of Trump is too harsh. Overall, the focus for Trump voters here is the big picture: the economy, jobs, and border security.

Bartow County is 885 miles from Manhattan, but this is Donald Trump country. He took 46 percent of the vote here during the primary, trailed by Ted Cruz at 25 percent and Marco Rubio at 18 percent. In the general election, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton, winning 75 percent of the vote to Clinton's 21 percent.

Currently, however, President Trump’s job approval is clinging to the 40 percent threshold. And while Republican members of Congress, save for a select few, are backing the president, his legislative agenda appears stalled, with the prospects of health-care reform tenuous at best. Tax reform, at this point, looks like a pipe dream.

Trump's struggles have left Republicans, who had once hoped to gain seats in 2018, worrying they might lose control of both the House and Senate. "Obviously no one knows what is going to happen in next year's midterm elections, but analysts who have watched congressional elections for a long time are seeing signs that 2018 could be a wave election that flips control of the House to Democrats,” Charlie Cook wrote recently in National Journal.

Trump keeps adding gasoline to fires, yet House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell behave as if it’s business-as-usual in Washington, D.C. If there is anything to explain their reticence in publicly rebuking Trump, it likely comes from GOP fears of alienating Trump voters across the country.

This is the predicament now facing conservatives and Republicans in Congress. Trump’s supporters—their own primary voters—are standing by him. But while Trump supporters want him to focus on the big picture issues such as health care and tax reform, the president spends most of his time consumed with the kind of trivialities other presidents leave for spokespeople to handle.

At this point, it does not appear that anybody in the White House can communicate to Trump the urgency to dial down the tweetstorms and outbursts. (Kellyanne Conway defended Trump’s tweeting as going “directly to the people.”)

That leaves leaders like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in a bind. They worry about Trump alienating the swing voters some of their members will need to win reelection but if they make their concerns public, Trump supporters may see it as an attempt to undermine the president. In March, Trump threatened lawmakers who didn't back the AHCA with a primary opponent. Many Republicans represent districts that went strongly for Donald Trump in 2016, and while they hold safe seats for the general election, none of them want to waste time and resources beating back primary opponents.

Much as Trump voters may detest insiders, the president’s ability to enact his agenda now rests on Ryan and McConnell. They’re left to perform a high-wire act of politics and personal persuasion, trying to rein in their president’s excesses without alienating their own voters. If they can’t pull it off, voters in places like Cartersville are likely to be unforgiving. Couple that with a resurgent Democratic electorate, and the wave election Charlie Cook warned about comes closer every day.

 We can only hope that the Republicans' worst nightmares are realized in 2018.

How Virginia Ceased to Be a "Red State"

Virginia population change - the areas in blue are the GOP strongholds

Since my early days in the Republican Party there has been a sea change in Virginia politics and elections - at least outside of carefully gerrymandered districts to favor the GOP (for the record, the gerrymandering occurred well after I left the Republican Party).  The new reality is that for Republicans running statewide, especially at the presidential level, Virginia is an increasingly hostile state.  Why?  The rapidly changing demographics of Virginia and the rising voting strength of the so-called "urban crescent" that stretches from the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., south through Richmond and then on to Hampton Roads.  The population of this urban crescent exceeds that of the rest of the state and can, therefore, out vote the GOP strongholds in rural Virginia.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this major - and in my view, very positive - change.  Here are excerpts:

A little more than a decade ago, President George W. Bush won Virginia with ease for a second time — an eight-point victory that was never in doubt.

Over the subsequent eight years, nearly the opposite happened: Barack Obama won the state twice, becoming the first Democrat to win here since Lyndon B. Johnson’s victory in 1964.

Now, Virginia appears to be drifting out of reach for Republican Donald Trump; he trailed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points in an NBC-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll released Friday. Analysts are contemplating taking Virginia off the list of presidential battlegrounds entirely and tucking it neatly in the column of safely blue states.
 Where uncertainty remains is whether that status applies only this year, because of the steady decline of Trump’s campaign, or whether it is a sign of a longer-term problem for Virginia Republicans that will extend beyond presidential races in years to come.

What is clear is that the demographics of the state have shifted dramatically in the space of a single decade, with populations of educated, high-income professionals as well as immigrants and other minorities — all voters who tend to choose Democrats — growing in urban areas. These shifts reflect national trends, Pew research shows.

[Trump] also has alienated large swaths of the electorate that have become deciding factors in Virginia races: women, minorities and educated professionals.  David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report predicted that Trump is at risk of losing by a landslide in the vote-rich suburbs of Northern Virginia — and that no amount of support in the less-populous rural regions could counteract that.

Even Virginia Republicans acknowledge the challenge. Trump counts few Republican elected officials among his vocal supporters in part due to some of his more inflammatory comments, which have alienated groups including women, Muslim Americans, Hispanics and those with disabilities.

Here’s another way to look at it: From the 1992 to the 2012 presidential elections, the population of Northern Virginia grew from 1.5 million to 2.2 million. And it grew with an influx of a particular kind of voter; in that same time period, in Fairfax County alone, Democrats’ lead over Republicans in Fairfax grew from three points to 15 points, according to election returns, with Obama garnering nearly 6 in 10 votes.

Now, Democrats rely on what may be fast becoming a fail-safe formula: Focus on turning out voters in the “urban crescent” of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads and the college towns of Charlottesville and Blacksburg, and it becomes really hard to lose. Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) used this playbook to defeat Republican Ken Cuccinelli II in the 2013 governor’s race — and Clinton is on track to do the same this year.

Even with the relatively high turnout of a presidential year, there simply aren’t enough Trump voters to overtake Democrats’ edge in the north. 

While things are looking more and more positive in Virginia, the same trend is happening in states like North Carolina - and even in Texas.   The demographics that favor Democrats are steadily growing and the GOP has done nothing but alienate these voters.