Republicans’ Lost Youth

By Kristen Soltis Anderson

Thursday, December 01, 2022

 

The night after the polls closed in this midterm, when it was increasingly clear that a bold Republican victory would not be in the offing, I joined a few friends for some dinner and commiseration. As we discussed the question of what to do next, I was asked what one concrete thing I’d want everyone around the table to do that might make a difference for the future of the ideas we care about. 

 

I pondered for a moment, not wanting to assign “homework” that would be too daunting, labor-intensive, or, worse, forgettable. So I asked for something simple.

 

“If you ever hear someone claiming to quote Winston Churchill saying ‘If you’re young and conservative you have no heart; if you’re old and liberal, you have no brain,’ please let them know that everything they’ve just said is incorrect.”

 

Churchill is not on record as ever having said it, and there’s not a shred of data to support the claim that young people are naturally progressives. Yet in a decade and a half of studying young voters, I hear this quote and its underlying sentiment constantly from those on the right.

 

I can think of no misconception more damaging to the future of conservatism than the idea that young people are a lost cause and we must just passively wait for them to awaken to our way of seeing the world.

 

That the Right had a disappointing midterm is well-covered terrain by now. Some diagnoses suggest that the GOP failed to reach moderates and swing voters, or failed to activate the base. Others blame rhetorical and policy extremism, poor candidate quality in key races, or Dobbs’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. When many races are decided by a percentage point or two, any explanation is at least a bit plausible. 

 

And yet, if we wish to understand why Republicans aren’t notching more victories, we should consider the Right’s continuing struggles with Millennials and Generation Z.

 

Political-data types disagree about the impact of the youth vote on the midterms. On the one hand, some say young voters surged in their turnout and that this blocked a red wave. John Della Volpe, the longtime chief of youth polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, projected that the jump in young-voter turnout seen during the 2018 #resistance midterm would continue. He found that 40 percent of voters under age 30 said they would “definitely” vote in the midterms, a figure similar to findings in the blue-wave year of 2018. Similarly, Anthony Salvanto, the head of elections and surveys at CBS News and one of my favorite analysts, touted youth turnout as decisive.

 

Supporting his analysis are the scholars at Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, who projected that young voters would have an outsize influence in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, critical swing states that have kept the Senate in Democratic control. Stories from campuses such as that of the University of Michigan add images to the data, with reports of lengthy lines to vote.

 

This, paired with the network exit polls’ estimates that voters under age 30 broke for Democratic candidates by a two-to-one margin — roughly the same margin by which they broke for Democrats in the 2018 midterms — all paint a picture of a generation that behaved the same way they did in a blue-wave year, even as the rest of the electorate shifted rightward. (Voters in their 40s, for instance, broke for Democrats by six points in 2018 but swung to vote Republican by seven points this time around.)

 

On the other hand, analysts such as Democrat David Shor have suggested that claims of a “youthquake” have been overstated. His analysis of Georgia, for instance, suggests that young-voter turnout in 2022 looked more like 2014’s lackluster showing than 2018’s youth-turnout boom. 

 

It’s not clear what would be worse for the Republican Party: It’s bad if Democrats did figure out how to turn out young voters this year; it’s also bad if they haven’t actually cracked the code but young voters stood in the way of Republican victories nevertheless.

 

And it isn’t just the youngest voters who are eschewing the Republican Party. The voting behavior of those in their thirties makes me even more worried for the Right. Here, we face the consequences of the GOP’s failure to reach the twentysomethings of the decade gone by. If we track the course of different age groups over the past three midterms, we see that, by the 2022 midterm, the damage done to the GOP’s standing among seniors during the 2018 midterm was entirely undone, while the damage done among younger voters — those under age 40 — was persistent.

 

Starting with the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans made substantial gains in both the House and the Senate, Republicans did lose young voters, but by margins that are modest compared with the dramatic gaps seen in this year’s exit polls. Fast-forward four years and Republicans’ support has atrophied enormously among all age groups. Republicans basically tied Democrats with those over the age of 50 and lost younger age groups by wide margins in the 2018 elections.

 

This year, Republicans bounced back to 2014 levels with older voters, doing even better with 50- to 64-year-olds nationally than they had eight years before. The GOP won seniors by twelve points, and those ages 50 to 64 by eleven. Where, then, were the 2014-style victories?

 

The oldest Millennials are just now entering their forties, but the bulk are in their thirties, and this is where we see some differences emerge. In 2014, Democrats won thirtysomethings by four points; this year they won them by nine. And Republicans lost voters under age 30 not by a little, but by a whopping 28 points.

 

I cannot state this forcefully enough: Republicans’ current standing with young voters is appalling, and it does not need to be this way. 

 

For instance, Republicans won younger voters in the 1994 midterms that ushered Newt Gingrich to the speakership, and it was voters in their thirties and early forties in that election who were the most upbeat about the GOP. Ronald Reagan dominated the youth vote in his reelection bid in 1984. When conservatives shrug and give up on young voters because it has “always” been this way, they betray a staggering misunderstanding of how young people voted in the latter part of the 20th century. 

 

For Republicans to bridge the gap between their older base and a new generation, they need to understand the differences between them.

 

It will not be surprising to hear that, on culture, the Right is on the ropes. Issues such as same-sex marriage are considered settled by a younger generation, and shifts in young people’s views have preceded a shift among the older generations as well, with three-quarters of young Americans and now half of those over age 65 saying they think that legal same-sex marriage is a good thing, according to Pew. 

 

The issues go beyond same-sex marriage, however, and the overall situation for social conservatives has deteriorated even in the past few years. On abortion, the generation gap was relatively muted when I first began studying the youth vote a decade ago; the winds have shifted dramatically today. In 2017, only 25 percent of those under 30 said they supported legal abortion “in any circumstance.” Today, that figure has more than doubled, to 53 percent, according to Gallup. 

 

But crucially, it is not just on hot-button social issues that a younger generation has broken with the Right. As labor unions confronted an ageing member base, they made a concerted effort to win over a new generation. They’ve succeeded: In 2010, only 53 percent of those under age 30 had a positive view of labor unions; by 2018, it had risen to 68 percent, according to Pew. Today, there is a large gap between those over and under age 50 on whether unions are having a “positive impact on the country,” and among the young, unions are viewed as having a more positive effect than are institutions such as churches or the military. 

 

In CNN’s pre-election polling, 70 percent of young voters — more than any other age group — said President Biden “hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.” But when younger voters say they worry that the Biden administration is not focused enough on the right priorities, the reality is that they are likely to want bold action on issues such as climate change and gun control. That includes young Republicans, nearly half of whom say we need more, not less, action to address climate change. 

 

Republicans do not need to become Democrats to win young voters. Before the election, plenty of evidence showed that young people were disillusioned with Democrats; copying them won’t do the GOP any good. But Republicans need to be aware of how a variety of social and economic positions are acting as roadblocks to the youth vote. They either must convince young voters that traditional conservative social views have merit or be prepared to compromise. Doing neither and writing the youth vote off entirely is a recipe for disaster.

 

There were some bright spots for Republicans on Election Night that are worth examining. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also lost young voters, but by much slimmer margins than Republicans lost them elsewhere, and he outright won voters in his own 30–44 age bracket. While much national attention on DeSantis focuses on his battles over immigration and LGBT issues in K–12 public education, he has also spoken often about the need to mitigate the effects of climate change and to protect the Florida Everglades, and he has endorsed a 15-week abortion ban in Florida. He has also embraced the fact that Republicans are increasingly skeptical of corporate power, a view that Millennials and Generation Z have espoused as well.

 

Republicans’ poor performance with young voters is not new anymore. And with each passing election in which such voters are neglected, the GOP’s challenges have intensified. Running up the numbers with seniors is not enough, and the 2022 midterms are a startling example of what happens when Republicans assume that disappointed young voters will stay home until they’re older and magically turn conservative.