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Why Republicans Haven’t (Yet) Lost The Selfie Vote
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a pollster who’s spent the last few years arguing that Republicans can do better with young people, if only they can figure out how to tailor their message to the Millennial generation. Last month, she published a book on the subject, The Selfie Vote, and has been doing the media rounds promoting it. Here’s an an interview with her on the Cato Daily Podcast, and here’s another with Reason’s Nick Gillespie:
Anderson, a Millennial herself, offers plenty of reason for Republican dismay: not only do Millennials vote for Republicans less than previous generations did at the same age, there’s less reason to think that they will “naturally mature” into conservatives as they grow older. Worse yet, Republicans have shown little effort — and even less success — at figuring out why that might be or what they can do about it.
But Anderson suggests we can do something about it and offers some encouraging answers that don’t align well with conventional wisdom. To begin with, she doesn’t think social issues — specifically, gay marriage — are quite the albatrosses they’re generally presented as being. Indeed, Millennials’ attitudes about abortion are on par with those of other generations, with about half of them thinking it is morally wrong. Additionally, Millennials are actually more judgmental about sexual sins like adultery than their predecessors, and other research has shown that — stereotypes aside — they have fewer sexual partners by the age of 25 than did either Boomers or Gen-Xers. Full-sprectrum social conservatives they may not be, but neither are Millennials morality-phobic participants in unending bacchanalia. By presenting traditional values in Millennial-freindly ways — specifically, by emphasizing harm to others — Republicans have both more reasons to hope and fewer to despair than they might have thought.
Moreover, Anderson thinks Millennials might be receptive to Republican stances on economics, provided the message is tailored to their needs. Millennials are adverse to taking on debt as adults, due both to watching their parents’ savings go up in smoke in 2008 and because many of them emerge from college with heavy loans. Consequently, they have much lower rates of home and car ownership than did previous generations at the same age, and seem less interested in those things as markers of adulthood (in one of the most startling statistics in the book, fully 54% of 18-year-olds today don’t even have a drivers’ license). They do, however, respond positively to the idea of finding meaning through work and are eager to listen to anyone who will talk sense about the education debt crisis.
Anderson further argues that Millennials aren’t particularly enamored of the Democratic Party, let alone its policies. As she wrote in an article last fall:
And while it is certainly true that the GOP is not loved by very many young people, it is an astonishing failure on the part of the Democrats that their performance on the ballot in the Harvard survey is so underwhelming, given that fewer than one out of four young people actually approve of the job Republicans are doing in Congress. That Republicans have pulled to nearly even with Democrats on questions like “which party do you trust more to handle the economy” is a remarkable turn of events from just four years ago. That 57 percent of young people still say they disapprove of the Affordable Care Act is devastating for Democrats who have relied on that law as the crux of their sales pitch to the Millennial generation.
There’s an opportunity here, if only we will take it.
Published in Culture, Politics
Here’s the key to this paradoxical puzzle: keep the promises we’ve already made but stop making new promises that are obviously not sustainable. If there’s compromise to make then we can compromise on the edges of the opposite sides of this equation.
“We” haven’t made any promises. It would be unconstitutional to do so. I’m with you that we should limit cuts to people already collecting or just about to collect, but we shouldn’t adopt the progressive lies.
I’d also add that in some cases those marginal changes aren’t enough, as with pension reform. In California, there isn’t enough to cover existing state employees, never-mind future hires.
Just for clarity; I was just referring to SS and Medicare. I think the states are constitutionally capable of making future looking promises.
Basically, this is what has us screwed- that a majority of our electorate cannot understand math. I’m sure you’ve read polls that ask questions of respondents regarding the need for entitlement reform (largely supported) but rejection of all possible reform mechanisms (higher taxes, cutting benefits).
Depressing. I am living in the people’s republic of Illinois, and dread this coming confrontation with reality. It will hurt a lot. I am not in Chicago, but a collar county, and it will probably be really painful for us either way.
This is a great post. I’ve spent some time with Millennials, and there are some great open doors for persuasion that were closed to my generation (Xer) and Boomers. They are hungry for wisdom and clarity and spirituality in ways that other generations were not, and they are very sensitive to issues of justice, but they aren’t fooled as easily by solutions of the Left. I think if we would frame our argument in terms of justice (our policies lead to a better and more just society that allows individuals to live with freedom and opportunity) we could make a lot of headway.
For millenials, and everyone else, we need to stress the superiority of our outcomes. In addition, the corruption of our free market system has become a true liability for the R/Conservative side. I HATE it when our pols call it “crony capitalism”! in every other system, this is called “socialism” – where the government does not own, but controls the means of production. At the least, let’s call that cronyism, not capitalism. It is anything but.
If there is something that can credibly be called “the selfie vote”, doesn’t that mean we’ve already lost?
Now get off my lawn.
Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA [http://www.turningpointusa.net/charliekirk/] appears to successfully connecting with younger voters in college campuses all over. What’s he doing right that we aren’t?