Young Americans are Fleeing the GOP. Will Democrats Screw This Up?

I recently pointed out that Democrats tend to think progress either occurs incrementally or through dramatic change. These distinct theories of change can help us understand why certain voters support a given candidate. Age, I reasoned, was the best indicator of how individuals understood societal progress. Generally speaking, the dramatic-change camp is occupied by younger voters, while incrementalist tendencies are exhibited by older individuals (yes, I realize there are older individuals who support Bernie Sanders and younger people who love Hillary Clinton). While I still remain hopeful that Democrats will be demographically forced to abandon incrementalism, I’m becoming more skeptical — especially after I saw findings from  a new survey of American adults  which shows that Republicans have lost significant ground with young voters in the last year alone (emphasis mine): Sixty-one percent of 18-to-29 year-olds prefer that a Democrat be elected president in the fall, while 33 percent of those surveyed back a Republican. That gap of 28 percentage points has nearly doubled since a similar poll conducted last year … In pursuit of votes from their xenophobic and misogynistic base, Republicans have been forced into an awful short-term electoral strategy. By doing so, the GOP has abandoned young voters, which not only happens to be myopic, but also a terrible long-term strategy as a host of research shows. Partisan identification in one’s early years becomes “ a remarkably stable factor over a voters’ life .” So when you have nearly 51% of “millennials identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic, compared with 35% who identify with the GOP or lean Republican ,” you’re alienating the next generation for (perhaps) the rest of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. An influential work on party identification, The American Voter (1964), found that “persons who identify with one of the parties typically have held the same partisan tie for all or almost all of their adult lives.” Everything which I’ve just laid out seems to be excellent news for Democrats. So why am I nervous about these findings? Here’s the rub. The Republican surrender of the youth vote could benefit the conservative movement in a key way: it
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