False Hope: Why Libertarians Won’t Help Republicans Win the Youth Vote

[DonViejo]

Alan I. Abramowitz, Senior Columnist, Sabato's Crystal Ball August 28th, 2014

The Republican Party has a major problem with young voters. According to national exit polls, the GOP has lost the under-30 vote by a wide margin in every election since 2004. In 2012, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by a whopping 23 percentage points among 18-29 year olds. Romney’s deficit among young voters was responsible for his entire margin of defeat in the national popular vote. Based on the exit poll results, Romney actually won more votes than Obama among voters who were 30 years of age and older.

Based on demographic trends and data from recent surveys, the GOP’s youth problem is not likely to improve any time soon. The age cohorts that will be entering the electorate over the next two decades include even larger proportions of nonwhites than today’s 18-29 year-old voters. And despite the claim by one scholar that a majority of 18-20 year olds voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, data from the Gallup tracking poll based on thousands of interviews with 18-20 year olds during 2013-14 showed no evidence of Republican gains in this age group.

The GOP’s youth problem has led to considerable speculation by pundits and Republican strategists about what the party should do to increase its appeal to younger voters in the future. One idea that has attracted some support both inside and outside of the party is that Republicans could win over younger voters by nominating candidates who espouse libertarian policies on issues ranging from same-sex marriage and national security to government regulation and health care.

The claim that candidates with libertarian views could help Republicans appeal to younger voters was recently advanced in a lengthy article by Robert Draper in the New York Times Magazine. Draper’s argument is based on the assumption that many younger Americans are attracted to the libertarian philosophy of maximum individual freedom and minimal government. But how realistic is this assumption?

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http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/false-hope-why-libertarians-wont-help-republicans-win-the-youth-vote/

[Thinkingabout]

1. The GOP platform has hardened against many things and does not seem ready

To make necessary changes to correct the extreme far right positions, until this happens I do not see a lot of younger folks jumping on with the GOP and women are pulling further away.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. If they try to suck up to the "libertarian" fringe

on social issues like same-sex marriage and legal marijuana, they'll lose the fundies. Illegal campaigning by fundie clergy is a huge source of votes and money for the GOP; the Ayn Rand-reading stoner college boys who think they're going to grow up to be John Galt won't do nearly as much for them.

[1StrongBlackMan]

3. Maybe, the analysis is limited to/in the context of ...

the Draper article This article/OP (that I haven't read); but, I suspect its conclusions are off-base, in that its analysis measures the wrong issues ...

First, the libertarian position on social issues would be a wash in terms of Democratic positions ... Younger voters are like Democrats ... socially/culturally liberal. Republicans adopting the libertarian position on these issues, can only attract the younger voters, if the rest of the republican platform is attractive.

But more importantly, the libertarian positions that are most likely to attract younger voters are not the social/cultural; but rather, those causing such distress on DU, and is how rand paul is casting libertarianism ... specifically, the NSA, Individual privacy, and anti-warism/isolationism. The study/analysis doesn't measure any of these things.

However, I suspect that the OP's final, final conclusion is correct ... the gop will not attract the young vote by taunting libertarian positions, even with a rand paul agenda, because are few republicans that would promote them ... and even if they did, they would still lose national elections because the would be trading a small (but growing) cohort for their older, established cohort.