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To reiterate, Republicans depend on winning the white vote by inflated margins to offset the minority vote in Texas, Georgia etc. Republican's margin with white voters come from silents and baby boomers. As they die off and as millennial whites age into peak voting years, the GOP margins with white voters will recess towards the national average and that is not enough to sustain GOP majorities or even pluralities in TX and GA.
This assumes that virtually no Gen X-ers or Gen Y-ers will be getting any more conservative as they age. In other words, for most people, once you choose and ideology and a party affiliation, they never change. Not a good assumption to make.
A very good assumption to make. The idea that people become more politically conservative as they age is a flat-out myth with no basis in reality. Most people don't change ideology or party affiliation, research indicates that political perceptions of the party in power during young adulthood is one of the most powerful influencers on life-long ideology. Yes, obviously some people change their partisan status throughout their lives or major shifts can occur due to crises that presage political realingments, and it's not that uncommon for the later-in-life party switchers to originate disproportionately from certain sub-demographics that get edged out of one coalition into the other (e.g. segments of the WWC right now). But taken from a broader view across the aggregate populace, partisan loyalties and ideological leanings tend to remain fairly consistent throughout the lives of most people post-young adulthood.
The types of numbers the GOP is now generating among those under 50 as a whole is bad enough, even worse though is the degree to which they are getting walloped by those under 30. Those are exactly the voters most impressionable to long-term political identity formation being set in stone by current events. They voted for the Democrats by an astounding 35% margin over Republicans in the past midterm. That's a generation of loyal Democrats. Will some of them switch overtime? Yes. Can a new political alignment emerge a couple of decades out due to unforeseen events? Of course. Could some become swing voters between a reformed Republican Party and an ossified Democratic Party? Absolutely.
But numbers like those indicate that Republicans have already burned their bridges with many of today's young adults, who will be carrying their more liberal identity forward as they age into peak political participation years. Any Republican that doesn't take that omen seriously is whistling past the graveyard.
