The old die and the young get older. How will generational change affect the Republican party? Now I'm not talking about how the general population changing will affect its ability to win, I'm more talking about within the party itself.
Polls show that Trump consistently does much better with younger Republican primary voters than DeSantis, and vice versa.
Polls do not necessarily show this with very high consistency, and in 2016 Trump tended to do worse with younger voters, albeit with very strong regional differences; he did slightly better in New England states the younger a voter was, but in the West even in places he won landslides his support with Republicans under 40 was basically nonexistent. (I think
better polls tend to show Trump weaker with younger voters, and I expect that whatever the truth is the patterns will probably be regionally divided -- because they were in 2016.)
Younger GOP voters are more likely to be more moderate on social issues, but at the same time are more likely than older Republicans to be invested in the sorts of culture war battles that often begin online.
Younger Republicans are certainly less hardline overall on issues like abortion, drugs, and gay marriage, which is downstream from being less religious. "The sort of culture war battles that often begin online" feels too non-specific for me to comment.
They are less economically hardliner than older Republicans,
This is extremely false. Younger Republicans have consistently voted for more fiscally hardline candidates, like Paul in '12 and Cruz in '16, and Pew tends to show them having more consistently fiscally hardline positions than older voters.
and notably they are WAY more isolationist/non-interventionist than older Republicans, having a massive polling divide over Ukraine aid.
This is probably true at the moment, but in general you often have enormous turnarounds on foreign policy issues over the course of a decade; consider that Republicans polled as broadly interventionist in the 1980s, isolationist in the 1990s, and interventionist again in the 2000s. I think we don't have a good idea of what the GOP's position on foreign policy will look like 10 years from now, much less looking further into the future.
Overall with generational change, the party seems to be heading in a more moderate direction in some ways, but a more Trumpy and populist direction in others.
How do you think this will affect the party heading into the future?
Overall the party is half of society, so it's going to be less white and less religious almost by default. (Though
relative to the societal average note that these gaps could grow; if mainstream society is getting more secular, but an evangelical counterculture is growing and mostly loyal to the GOP, then the pattern one imagines is the median voter secularizing a lot, but the median GOP voter secularizing only a little. The
difference between them might well grow). Beyond that probably both parties will be much lower-trust organizations down the road. Beyond
that the GOP is still getting more ideologically fiscally conservative, and it's hard to imagine that trend reversing absent either a very large societal crisis forcing new perspectives on government activity (think a world war, or a larger pandemic than COVID), or issue shifts associated with having a much older population dependent on pensions.
I'm more curious as to what happens with the Democrats. Does formerly Republican big money donors infiltrate their party pushing them to the right economically, or does it, for better or worse, continue becoming a more progressive party?
Continued declining trust in institutions, and the likelihood of peak educational enrollment being hit in the 2020s, is going to cause a crisis in the Democratic Party; it is already the case that there are huge culture gaps between Democratic politicians under the age of 60 or so and their voters. I think in its general style it will come to resemble the modern GOP more, particularly as it is forced into an Overton Window which is downstream of SCOTUS decisions on the administrative state. My expectation here is that the GOP is going to keep moving right on regulations/taxes, and that to some extent the Democratic party will be dragged along with it, though it will remain far to the left of the GOP. 'Big money donors' aren't what's pushing the parties right, though; it's the right's general ability to evince a worldview which is compelling to those who are cut off from mainstream American educated culture.
I have not seen any stats on this, but anecdotally ... my Republican-leaning friends have kids earlier AND have more kids than my Democratic-leaning friends. Birth rate is a FAIRLY important thing demographically speaking.
The conservative fertility advantage emerged in the 1990s, was fairly small for several decades, but began growing rapidly after circa 2015, and is now very large. I can go hunt for my source, but 2015 was the year in which 'fraction of births to white mothers' hit a trough; it has since been
rising, and in the 2020s is again a majority of births. The second derivative of the demographics rates chart looks quite favorable for the GOP. (Of course another question here is retention rates).
Note that this is another way in which 'GOP culture' is becoming increasingly different from the American mainstream, though.
Honestly in my experience, younger Republicans are even bigger freaks than their older counterparts. I think that the party will become more extreme as time goes on.
Yeah. I can't find my source on this, but while there's very little generation gap on 'normal' gun issues like background checks and handguns, if you go to 'gun extremism' issues -- like legalizing automatic weapons -- then you get that this is an unheard-of position among old voters but a majority position among pro-gun voters under 35. I think it is possible that the gun debate will shift to an entirely new field of issues (like legalizing much more dangerous weapons than AR-15s, or deliberately spreading gun rights around the globe, as some GOP politicians have advocated and as I've, purely anecdotally, often heard advocated by young Republicans for how nonexistent of an idea it is in the general public sphere), in which you might see left-wing victories. That'll require capitulation on the current set of gun issues, though.
My general thought is that demographic change will turn quite dramatically in favor of Republicans over the next decade or two. At some point, virtually all of the young families with 2+ kids being devoutly religious and/or Southern will matter. Republicans are also doing well enough at flipping recent immigrants that diverse immigration isn't a huge net gain for Dems either at this point.
On the one hand, it's extremely underrated that one of the most powerful predictors of trending right in the post-2016 era has been "exposure to non-English-language news outlets". On the other hand, even if you take quite optimistic projections of ideological retention rate, I think the
earliest you'd see a real impact from birthrate differentials is in the 2040s, when the first post-2015 births start reaching voting age, and in practice it'll probably take longer than that. And who knows what the issues will be by then. (Although the first inklings can be seen already -- the difference is largest in wealthy areas and it's already a stereotype of the 2020s that in wealthy areas the parents tend to be far to the right of the school board, which is elected by the community as a whole.) Also I suspect that, relative to society as a whole, the GOP hit a trough with young voters in the 2008 cycle and they're unlikely to vote that far left again.
As for the young R voters, they tend to be more moderate in some ways where they consider many issues that were once highly controversial in the 2010's to be settled (Obamacare, tariffs, probably Obergefell, etc.).
Obamacare is not at all a settled issue; the next GOP trifecta will at least try to repeal it, essentially no matter who the POTUS is. Tariffs are an issue that changes generationally; it was an issue in the 1800s and it'll probably still be an issue in the 2100s. I think gay marriage is settled in the court of public opinion but I'm not at all sure that a future harder-right SCOTUS majority -- which given Senate makeup probably
will be coming about -- won't want to revisit
Obergefell at some point, especially if we have further controversies about marriage definitions (like for polygamy).
Honestly in my experience, younger Republicans are even bigger freaks than their older counterparts. I think that the party will become more extreme as time goes on.
I think that you are a high-trust person and you are correct that younger Republicans have much less trust in institutions than older Republicans, leading to greater divergence from mainstream educated culture (which you represent). I think you are broadly correct that they will get more extreme in this sense. I think this is something happening to American society as a whole, though, and Democrats will struggle not to at least begin drifting in this direction. Not to harp one poll (particularly an
issue poll, which are always suspect), but note that one of the top topics in US General Discussion today is a poll showing a decline in belief in climate change
among Democrats. IDK if that's real, but the energies that want to reject the sources of consensus understanding exist everywhere and Democrats will be forced to throw them
some sort of bones if they wish to remain competitive.
