There are 33 comments.

1. Thatcher
   Goldwaterwoman

   @goldwaterwoman

   3:59 PM EDT ⋅ Oct 20, 2017

   Michael Graham (View Comment):
   

   Here’s the deal, Ricocheads: Among Millennials, the GOP is “mostly dead.”

   Here’s the data:

   • Among Americans aged 18-34, Trump’s disapproval rating is 62 percent, up from 58 percent in May, according to the recent survey from GenForward, Just 22 percent of respondents said they approve of his job performance.
   • At the end of August, Trump’s approval rating among 18-to-29-year-olds hit a dismal new low of 20 percent. He was also at 33 percent among 30-to-49-year-olds.
   • Another poll from over the summer showed 64 percent of Millennials would replace Donald Trump as president if they could.
   • Nearly a quarter of self-identified Millennial Republicans have defected to the Democrats since Trump took office.

   Data isn’t a solution, but it does define the problem.

   You can find just about any poll out there with a preconceived outcome. Just ask the actuaries. The biggest problem I can see with this data is it interviewed almost equal numbers of Hispanic (521), African American (506) and Whites (510). In the 2016 election 68.9% of the voters were white, 11.9% were Hispanic and 12.3% were Black. The rest were Asian or other. My sources are Pew and the US Census Bureau, both of which vary within a small percentage of each other.

   Is this why they oversampled minorities? “The GenForward survey is a project of the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago. Interviews were conducted with a representative sample from GenForwardSM, a nationally representative survey panel of adults ages 18-34 recruited and administered by NORC at the University of Chicago and funded by grants to the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.”

   “Thirty-nine percent of the completed interviews are sourced from the Black Youth Project (BYP) panel of young adults recruited by NORC. The BYP sample is from a probability-based household panel that uses an address-based sample from a registered voter database of the entire U.S. Households were selected using stratified random sampling to support over-sampling of households with African Americans, Latino/as, and Asian Americans ages 18-34. NORC contacted sampled households by U.S. mail and by telephone, inviting them to register and participate in public opinion surveys twice a month.

2. Member
   Z in MT

   @ZinMT

   5:52 PM EDT ⋅ Oct 20, 2017

   Michael Graham: But whether it’s Millennials or Gen Y, does anyone see any evidence the Right is even trying to speak to young people? Haven’t we simply abandoned them to the tender mercies of late-night TV hosts?

   Millenials = Gen Y. Maybe you are thinking of Gen Z?

   Polling shows that Gen Z is the most conservative generation ever. Yes, they are still majority Democrat, but they are less majority Democrat, and more minority Republican than any other generation was at their age. Why? Because the right is the fun side now. The leftists are the establishment and are all a bunch of scolds that never laugh. The right is rebellious and likes to make jokes.

3. Member
   Michael Graham

   @MichaelGraham

   Post author

   5:10 AM EDT ⋅ Oct 21, 2017

   JeffHawkins (View Comment):
   I don’t think millennials being exposed to a working model or more theories of conservatism is the chasm, it’s the entrenchment of negatives about conservatism in every day life. It’s narrative. It’s the negatives that are out there we’re fighting against rather than a lack of positive examples.

   We can get tax cuts, have the economy grow, and they’ll hear from their friends that it was by hurting the poor. The Reagan era was bad because it expanded the wealth gap, etc.

   We could get more religious freedom and they’ll hear that we hate gay people. You hear one criticism of the gay community from a local representative in a small district in a state, that becomes “All Republicans hate gays” then if you get a lucid response about the dangers of elevated rights you tie in the “All Republicans hate gays” as your motive

   Our problem isn’t extolling the virtues of our philosophy, it’s that there’s a narrative response considered “valid” that anticipates the success, twists it as actually harmful and becomes fact.

   Our problem isn’t a lack of exposure, our problem is peer pressure and narrative.

   Politics is downstream of culture and we’re not even fighting back in popular culture–where most 30 and younger voters get their information/develop their attitudes