Young Republicans were the most likely to bail

[frigidmagi]

washington post

One of the arguments Donald Trump used on the campaign trail to suggest that his election was inevitable was that frustrated Democrats would cross party lines to support his candidacy. It’s clear that this actually happened, and perhaps happened enough to make the difference in the three states he narrowly won to clinch the electoral college majority and the presidency.

But new analysis from the Pew Research Center suggests that flipping parties between late 2015 and now was fairly uncommon — and that the most volatile group of voters should sound an alarm for Republicans over the long term.

Overall, about 20 percent of those in each party tracked by Pew wavered on their partisan support, with about half of that 20 percent eventually returning to their original party. About 10 percent of Democrats and Republicans, in other words, left their party and joined the opposition.


When you look at the data by age, though, the patterns are interesting. Among Democrats, those ages 50 to 64 were most likely to switch to the Republican Party — a group that clearly overlaps, to some extent, with those to whom Trump felt he held an appeal.



Nearly half of Republicans younger than 30 bailed on the party at some point, with 23 percent of that group flipping to the Democrats. The entire point of this research, of course, is that partisan identity isn’t entirely static, and younger voters may still be in the mode of determining where their political loyalties lie. If that’s the case, though, that phenomenon is restricted to the GOP; young Democrats were less likely to switch party identity than older Democrats.

The problem for Republicans is that those young voters may stay away from the GOP. Studies have shown that partisan identity is formed early on, with partisanship tending to correlate to the popularity of the president in office. As FiveThirtyEight noted in 2014, the most fervent Republican voters are those who were 18 at the outset of the Eisenhower and Reagan presidencies; the most Democratic were those who turned 18 as George W. Bush was mired in the Iraq War.

That’s the alarm bell that should be ringing at Republican Party headquarters right now: a historically unpopular president and young voters who are balking at the party. The period considered by Pew encompasses Trump’s campaign, of course, and just as those older Democrats who defected probably did so in part because of Trump, it’s fair to assume that some number of the younger Republicans who did so were driven by his candidacy, as well.

[Lys]

The article talks about alarm bells, but Republicans control the Presidency, both chambers of Congress, and the state governments of half the Union. It's hard to see what they have to be alarmed about.

[frigidmagi]

The article talks about alarm bells, but Republicans control the Presidency, both chambers of Congress, and the state governments of half the Union. It's hard to see what they have to be alarmed about.

That's nice Lys, but that's a temporary state. When your voting base increasingly looks like the inside of a retirement home it's time to start asking what's going to happen in 4, 6 or 8 years. Now this isn't a pronouncement of doom for the Republican party (things do change after all) but to be blunt they control all of that today but if they want to control that tomorrow? They gonna need more voters under 30.

[Lys]

People under thirty barely vote, and party platforms are not static. They don't need to be appeal to the under thirty demographic now, they need to appeal to them when they're in their thirties and forties, which will still be a while. In that while, the Republicans are going to be shaping the course of the country on account of being the ones actually running it.

[frigidmagi]

Actually more millennials vote then in prior generations, nearly 50% of them voted in 2008 and 2012, this is higher then our averages for Generation X at the same age. Additionally people don't switch parties as often as you think when they age.

Lastly, this supermajority is a temporary situation that could be lost by 2018 making grand announcements that they'll be shaping the country when they haven't even managed to repel Obamacare is rather a big jump don't you think?

[Lys]

Shaping the country in theory. In practice the country is shaped by vast impersonal forces such that when you get down to it the Republicans can be in charge of everything yet wind up pursuing policies that boil down to the same shit as the Democrats except with more tax cuts. Which reminds me, i should post that wonderful pair of articles i read in the Observer a few weeks ago.

Anyway, when you're planning strategy it is important to balance long term and short term goals against each other. The current Republican strategy has resulted in their power extending across vast swathes of the US government at the state and federal levels. It may have also resulted in their incurring a demographic disadvantage in the future, but not incurring that that disadvantage would have likely cost them the breath of power that they have currently attained. As far as trade-offs go, being able to run things now is generally much more valuable than being able to run things later. The future is always less certain than the present, and the now will always influence the later. It is entirely rational for the Republicans to worry more about maximizing their appeal to the current voter base, over maximizing their appeal to the future voter base. The fact that they're doing a poor job of utilizing their power they have is beside the point.