Report: How GOP lost young voters

Politico ^ | June 3, 2013 | KATIE GLUECK

[rightwingintelligentsia]

A new postmortem on the November elections from the nation’s leading voice for college Republicans offers a searing indictment of the GOP “brand” and the major challenges the party faces in wooing young voters, according to a copy given exclusively to POLITICO on Sunday.

The College Republican National Committee on Monday made public a detailed report — the result of extensive polling and focus groups — dissecting what went wrong for Republicans with young voters in the 2012 elections and how the party can improve its showing with that key demographic in the future.

It’s not a pretty picture. In fact, it’s a “dismal present situation,” the report says.

The 95-page study, which looked at the party’s views on social and economic issues, as well as its messaging and outreach, echoes a March report on the election debacle issued by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, which presented a devastating assessment of the party’s current state of affairs.

But in some ways the new report from inside the GOP tent is even more scathing and ominous — since it comes from the party’s next generation.

[TADSLOS]

You can’t lose what you never had.

[slapshot]

Let’s not forget Dick Lugar and his Rino buddies essentially stabbing Mourdock in the back from the minute the primary was over. Lugar did not lift a finger to assist and I would bet worked actively behind the scenes to get Donnelly elected.

Sucks having to watch your back as well as fight the enemy. Payback for RINOS in Indiana will be a &^(*Y(.

[nascarnation]

Mourdock ran 10 points behind Romney

That's the definition of fail.

[re_nortex]

Politico...what do you expect...

You're 100% correct in that assessment since the source is known for its anti-American lies. Commie libs form the staff of that vile outfit and anything they publish is nothing but trash.

I'm over the age of 70 but I do know a number of young people and they're all solid Christian Conservatives and every one of the them opposes the homosexual agenda. The only reason they reject the GOP is because of its tilting to the left. Thankfully people like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Louie Gohmert represent the future of the Republican party. All three of them are greatly admired by the young people I know.

And just look at the admiration for Sarah and Todd Palin at Republic High School:

I honestly think that young people want America restored to the greatness it had prior to the liberalism that took hold in the 1960s.

I'll also add that the neighbor across the street is a tee-hugging, atheist leftist from Nashua, NH. He's been here in God's Country (as a result of a transfer in his high-tech job) since the mid-90s and still embraces the New England liberal values of his raising. But a gradual change is happening even in this guy. Why? His high school age daughter is a cheerleader in the good tradition of young Texans. She speaks with an appealing Southern accent in contrast to her dad's clipped nasal Yankee tone. And, best of all, she's Conservative and goes to church! I really think she's making some headway since her dad recently put up a flagpole on the porch with both Old Glory and the Texas flag. When he finally removes that silly COEXIST bumper sticker from his little clown car, I know that a conversion is nigh.

[Sam Gamgee]

Correct. Just embrace the devil. Didn't we already try that with milquetoast candidates like McCain and Romney. When will the establishment learn when faced between the choice of faux conservatives and real liberals, voters will pick the real liberal every time.

[Yollopoliuhqui]

The Republican party has been rubber stamping Wall Street and the armaments welfare state since Garfield caught a bullet. The GOP consists of two elements, neither of which created the party to begin with- the Tea Party as ghosts of the John Birch Society who preached ineffectively against the “Liberal Eastern Establishment” or the American nobility, an aristocracy symbolic of everything our Revolution of 1776 detested, and the “Liberal Eastern Establishment” itself which are the heirs of the Nazi intelligentsia, a mafia hell bent on dumbing down America enough to turn it into a new war lord feudal fiefdom of international financier oligarchs.

The oligarchs have the liberal press doing its dirty work and keeping the Tea Party and Sarah Palin from gaining any traction, nattering endlessly about “over population” so we can rationalize the “culling” of the 3rd World whose emergent industrialization is a threat to their loan sharking hegemony, while they are secretly in alliance with environmentalist ignoramuses. You probably think that Al Gore is a Democrat. (snicker)

Romney was correctly fingered by the youth demographic as a shill for business as usual for the Wall Street wrecking crew and looked the part, hence his perception problem. Comrade Obama didn’t look or talk like a Wall St. shill, got himself elected presumably for his anti-Wall St. rhetoric and will do more to fulfil the Wall St. oligarchs’ agenda and destroy the constitution than Romney on a perpetual bad hair day.

Freepers have simply got to wake up to the fact that MONOPOLISM is not capitalism, it is military-industrial complex FASCISM. We need a new set of I.D. cues for the enemies of this Republic. Start with a revival of the old JBS literature and compare that material with Alex Jones’ and Jessie Ventura. And before you yelp about whacko conspiracy theories, read the ding dong books, all of which are available on Amazon, before you ding dong knee jerk just the way the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Harrimans, the Schiffs, the Loebs, the Warburgs, the Rosthchilds and the rest of the Bilderberg, CFR, 40’s Committee, World Bank and the IMF circus want you to.

[ansel12]

It did cause us to lose two Senate seats, however.

Didn't the rinos lose 10 or 11 Senate races?

I know that Palin gave us our only Senate seat pick-up and that Romney could not deliver the Senate, although before his nomination it was seen as in the bag.

[ansel12]

Sheesh, what an idiot. Put your tin foil hat back on and crawl back into your hole.

[3Fingas]

We can appeal to young in a number of ways. Whether or not we choose to do so is another story:

1. Smarter use of new media and social networking. We need more Breitbart and less snail mail

2. Greater emphasis on economic and personal freedoms, less emphasis on social conservatism. The social conservatism should not be abandoned, but it should be properly articulated and targeted at regions of the country where the people are more receptive to it. Young people in Utah are more socially conservative than say young people in New Hampshire. In general, we would need more Von Mises Institute and less PTL Club.

3. Stress the things we have in common with the young:
a. Economic uncertainty/need for job growth/economic growth
b. Personal freedom/constitutional rights
c. Concern about high taxes
c. Need to improve/reform educational system
d. Gun rights

As a social conservative, I don’t think we should abandon our long-standing support of social issues. I do, however, think we can emphasize those things we have in common with most of other Americans, including the youth. Right now, my primary concerns are economic decline, national security, and government excess. The moral decline in this country is probably the worst threat to the long-term health of this country, but that is a chronic disease and cannot be reversed anytime soon. Economics, national security, and, to a lesser extent, government scope can be positively reformed much sooner. These areas are like arterial bleeding and must be fixed now or the patient dies.
A lot of our daily politics will be shaped by the regions of country. In the South, social conservatism can be more pronounced. In more liberal areas of the country, the emphasis should be on Economic and personal freedom. I think of this as smart 10th Amendment politics.

[HawkHogan]

Pretty sure young white males favored Romney. It’s the single white females that are the problem.

[kcvl]

Dear KATIE GLUECK - they were getting audited too?!

[EarlyBird]

If you believe, as I do, that the 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS STOLEN, then this Republican circular firing squad would be an exceptionally welcome added bonus for the demoncrats, don’t you think?

[Revel]

Any country relying on appeasing Young voters in this day and age is doomed! They are totally clueless without any moral or common sense compass to go by. They are trained as liberal socialists. They believe that they can have utopia, and without doing any work besides.

[jjotto]

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2013/03/27/missing-republicans—found-n1550038/page/full

...Even more startling, young people who happened to be white still comprised a big majority (61%) of all voters below the age of 30 and delivered a shocking, counter-intuitive verdict on the choice between the ineffably cool Barack and the hopelessly square Mitt: going for the Mormon grandfather of 18 by a decisive, near-landslide margin of 7 points.

In fact, the entire basis for Barack Obama’s strength among young voters in general stemmed from the disproportionate presence among them of blacks, Latinos and Asians—groups that tilted lopsidedly toward Obama.

Non-whites comprised 39% of the youth vote but only 28% of the overall electorate, so it’s hardly surprising that Romney would score a smaller overall percentage of these ballots from under-30 citizens.

Romney’s loss of young voters, in other words, reflects racial politics far more plausibly than any universal surge of youthful progressivism...

[JimRed]

Lost? You can’t lose what you never had in the first place. They’ve (most, anyway) been propagandized by leftist teachers since kindergarten.

[BfloGuy]

Republican parents didn't explain to their children rationally and calmly why they were Republicans. I always knew why growing up and it made perfect sense to me: we don't want the government to tell us what to do.

If it could work for me in the seventies, it should still work now.

[LibLieSlayer]

I with you 100%.

LLS

[LibLieSlayer]

In that picture... there appears one lone dimrat... look at all of the faces in that picture and see if you can tell which one is the dim!
;-)
LLS

[Moonman62]

The GOP is doing very well at the state level. It’s at the national level where the GOP wants to be the RINO party is where they are doing poorly.

[supercat]

“All the smart people believe this. You’re smart, so you should believe this, too!”

I think that's a big part. Leftists are also very good at convincing people that their plans are a product of such brilliance that everyone can understand them, and that those who oppose their plans do so because they lack the intelligence and insight necessary to see how they will work. This works in some measure because many people cannot comprehend the fact that political snake oil salesmen can be completely without truth. They think (perhaps correctly) that if the snake oil is even 1% as great as claimed, it will be worth something; they fail to recognize that the bigger the claims, the less likely they are to be even 0.0001% true.

Unfortunately, Republicans are prone to engage in quantitative arguments about whether the leftist snake oil is quite as good as claimed, than to call the leftists out as liars. In some measure, it's because exposing the leftists as liars would also expose themselves as having been aware of the leftists lies for decades but said nothing. The longer they let the leftists' lies slide, the greater their own culpability.