Young People Fleeing The Republican Party In Droves

Dawn Gibbons hosts a fashion show for Nevada Young Republicans

Yesterday we ran a post about how quite a few males over 50 who still like the same songs they were listening to 30 or more years ago would vote for McCain. Of course the ones who die between now and November won't be voting for McCain. And I bet a lot of the Bill O'Reilly Depends crowd will go vote for McCain too... if they remember. Today's Washington Post, on the other hand, has a story on the woes of Republicans in their 20s. They are the "few and the frustrated."

All the Reagan-worship goes over their head and makes them think their candidates are out-of-it "old fogies." The president of the Young Republicans moaned to the Post that "The Republicans are sort of talking down to Gen-Nexters, not bringing them in... You don't hear Barack Obama going around saying, 'I'm John F. Kennedy.' He's saying, 'I'm Barack Obama.' There's a reason for that. He's inspiring an entire generation, and it's a generation that's trying to change the world in 160 characters or less through text messages."

My friend's aunt is in her 90s and lives in a retirement hope. Like plenty of senior citizens, she's an Internet whiz. She's also an iTunes fanatic and gets great pleasure in turning the other residents on to new music and leading discussion groups. She literally goes on line to find good deals on walkers for her friends. John McCain, on the other hand, seems to think that a computer is some kind of new fangled typewriter he plans to learn sometime after he learns economics. His Internet policies simply don't exist. It's not part of his life, although he's heard about it. He also heard that people are paying a lot for gas nowadays.

The Republican brand, as Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), said recently, "is in the trash can. I've often observed that if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf." And it's even worse among people under 30.

Voters under 30 are more than twice as likely to identify themselves as Democrats, according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.

...Republicans haven't always been so disconnected. A quarter-century ago, Reagan charmed young voters and won 59 percent of their vote in 1984. In 1992, on the heels of the Reagan Revolution, voters under 30 split their allegiance about evenly between the two major parties. But every presidential cycle since then, Democrats have gained ground. This year, according to the Post-ABC poll, 44 percent of those under 30 call themselves Democrats, and only 18 percent identify as Republicans.

Today's Post also has a fashion story about tattoos. Oh, they must be all those Democrats, you think? Well, they may not be a certain kind of young (Young) Republican but I remember meeting a young man once and getting intimate with him only to discover a huge Nazi eagle and swastika tattoo. We got to discussing it and it turned out that his family had taught him to hate Jews. Asking him if he had ever met any led to the discovery that he had mixed up African-Americans and Jews. This was well before Republican propagandists started claiming Obama is a Jew but my young friend just absolutely knew that every single person of color he ever saw was Jewish. He had inherited his family's bigotry but I'm happy to report that after a summer of friendship he lasered off the swastika. I haven't been in touch with him in a number of decades so I don't know if he's still voting Republican or not; my guess is that he still is.