General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Look further than your own desire to get a left wing progressive in the White House [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)The age problem you describe comes from demographics.
Older Boomers, younger GenX and older Millenials tend to be liberal.
Younger Boomers, and older GenX tend to be conservative.
Younger Boomers and older GenX formed a coalition, creating the modern Republican party. It was pretty easy for them to do, since there's a fair amount of issue overlap due to being adjacent in age.
Older Boomers and younger GenX did not form a coalition. From the younger GenX side, we could not get the party to pay attention to our issues. For example, attempts to avoid tuition increases in the 80's and 90's got in the way of tax cuts and similar issues that benefited older Boomers at the time.
Instead, older Boomers formed a coalition with the younger end of the WWII generation. And the small size of GenX meant younger GenX just was not needed in the coalition in order to win in the 1980s and 1990s.
That resulted in extremely low turnout from young GenX and now Millennials. If the party isn't going to work on what they care about, their choices are shit or shit. That doesn't get people to the polls, much less interested in becoming party activists.
Unfortunately for the party, time marches on. And that 80's/90's coalition no longer has enough people in it to win. Yet the party leadership comes from that 80's/90's coalition, and does not want to change course.
They need young GenX and older Millennials now. So we get a whole lot of posts like the OP, lecturing "the kids" on how important it is to vote for the Democrat even when the policy history is bad. We also get a lot of complaints that we aren't marching or otherwise repeating the 1960s in order to do what older Boomers want passed - again, still no interest in what "the kids" want. Instead, there's a whole lot of people behaving as if they are entitled to the votes of everyone who doesn't worship Reagan, regardless of what the party has actually done.
The party isn't going to get younger voters until the party stops lecturing to younger voters, and starts listening to them. The party leadership shows no interest in doing so, and the lack of younger people in the party leadership means there's no one in power who can force the issue.
That leaves younger voters exactly one way to change the party: don't vote for it.
IMO, what's going to happen is the Republicans will wander further and further off into insanity. The Democratic party will become the right-wing party, and settle in to roughly where the Republicans were in the 1950's/1960's. Something else will arise as the new left-wing party, either a new party or one of the existing minor parties. It's going to take a generation or so. There will be a lot of bad things that happen in the meantime, because there will be no real check between the right and the far right. But our party backed itself into a corner, and only shows interest in moving to the right to get out of the corner.