Voters are increasingly turning away from the Republican Party, as voter registration and voter identity polls increasingly illustrate. And there seems to be few voices of reason on where the Republican Party should go from this point forward.
Voters under 30 voted 66% to 32% for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 – part of the biggest age disparity the exit polls have ever measured in a race for president. Young voters were the GOP’s worst age group in 2006 and 2004 as well.
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “History suggests that an entire generation’s partisan profile can be shaped in the first decade of voting. Imagine a Democratic-leaning millennial generation (those born between the late 1970s and the year 2000) adding 4 million potential voters a year to the U.S. electorate over the next decade.”
Young voters are less socially conservative than the electorate as a whole on issues ranging from homosexuality to immigration. They are also more secular and participate less in organized religion. In a recent Pew poll, 25% of Americans born since 1976 were atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – compared with 13% of baby boomers.
“Young voters need to see a GOP that is more socially libertarian, particularly toward gay rights. With changing demographics come changing attitudes,” Republican consultant Mike Murphy wrote in Time magazine this month, lamenting in the same column that “A GOP ice age is on the way.”
The GOP also has to find a way to appeal to non-white voters. In 2008, voters under 30 were 62% white while voters over 30 were 77% white .
So how can the GOP simultaneously attract black, Hispanic and Asian voters, continue its appeal to white voters, and also capture young voters?
Voters are looking for consistency — a cohesive vision for peace and prosperity — and solutions to our problems.
The Republican Liberty Caucus offers the solution: less government, more liberty.
Government at every level in this country continues to be too big, too intrusive, and too expensive.
Solutions we seek — from our nation’s dwindling health care system and dilapidated schools to our meddlesome foreign policy and increasing civil liberties violations — can be found when government is reduced or eliminated from the issue.
As a RLC Adviser Ron Paul has repeated time and again, liberty is the great unifier. A vision of limited government unites all Americans in the great purpose of our nation’s government: to protect the rights of all American citizens and to be limited in scope and size.
Is there any vision more empowering than that?
On June 22nd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Videos with a sound track featuring popular music could be used to help the GOP reach out to the young and minorities.
Here’s an example from the CFL.
Ron Paul & Tupac Changes V3