The Fading Republican Party

The Republican base is shrinking and they've lost the younger generations completely.

Why are Republicans struggling so much at the ballot box?

While there are still those who try to say the elections are rigged, that farce has become played out. The problem with that type of lie is that you eventually have to prove it, and they have never proven any issue in any election. Not that anyone is really surprised by that.

Then there are the allegations of government censorship such as with the Twitter Files. Sadly not only did they never manage to prove much with those files, the little they tried to prove was systematically ripped apart by Mehdi Hasan yesterday with his Matt Taibbi interview. The “reporting” that Taibbi had done was riddled with errors, and not minor ones. Completely wrong information and wrong data.

Whether by coincidental timing or as a convenient excuse, today happened to also be when Elon Musk decided to block links from Twitter going to Substack due to Substack announcing its new “Notes” feature, seen as competing with Twitter.

Taibbi said, for that reason, he will be leaving Twitter and therefore also no longer be working on the Twitter Files. Another debunked dead end for the GOP.

More recently Republicans tried to connect their own slow demise directly to America’s declining culture. A topic that fits directly in with their ongoing America First, Make America Great Again, mantras.

This poll, or more correctly two polls but more on that in a minute, asked people how important the following topics were to the poll taker.

• patriotism

• having children

• religion

• community involvement

• marriage

• money

In all categories there was a significant drop from the last time the poll was done in 2019, with the exception of money. 

The first issue with this is that up through 2019, the poll was done with phone polling. Whereas the latest numbers were done with online polling. Two different methods. That isn’t an ideal way to compare data. People may feel more of a pressure to give the expected answer when directly talking to another person, vs answering a form online. 

The second issue is that in between 2019 and now we had a major pandemic. People were stuck inside for over a year, they lost jobs, they lost community involvement, and then inflation hit. There was also another little thing, an attempted coup on the American government by people calling themselves “Patriots”.

But despite the inconsistency with the polling, and the obvious major factors that occurred in the time between the two sets of data points, Republicans pushed these results hard for all of two days before going quiet on the topic. It didn’t get the traction they hoped.

The GOP’s latest pivot is that the real problem is America’s youth. You see, the youth have been “indoctrinated” by the “radical left”. Their “proof” of this is that in the latest elections, Gen Z turned out in force and the large majority voted Democrat.

The same chart they used to defend this position also showed that the oldest generation was voting the most conservative. Then each subsequent younger generation had a larger Democrat percentage than the generation before. 

Older people have always skewed more conservative and younger more liberal, that part isn’t new. The percentage advantage on the Democrat side along with how politically active the youngest voting generation is the shift. 

It isn’t hard to see why this is happening. A common trope from days gone by was that having the two party system in America is a form of balance. One side is pushing for progress and is the gas, the other side is pushing to keep things how they are and is the brake. The two sides working together keeps a constant steady march towards progress without upending the current systems too quickly.

All the way back in the Clinton administration, a person named Newt Gingrich rose to be Speaker of the House. Before he was Speaker, Representatives spent most of their time in Washington D.C..

This led to politicians across the aisle interacting more. They would have each other’s families over for barbecues and have their kids play together. It created a bridge across the divide that allowed the system to work better because they could so easily remember that at the end of the day, we’re all human.

Gingrich had a new plan. He ordered the Representatives to spend a greater amount of their time in their home districts. The routine became flying in at the start of the week for all of the House sessions, then when session was adjourned for the week, immediately flying back home. No longer did Representatives mingle in their off hours or live in D.C.

Simultaneously, Gingrich began the modern era of obstructionist governing. His sole goal was to shut down Bill Clinton any chance he could. Fewer compromises were made, fewer things got done.

Mitch McConnell gleefully took up this mantra during the Obama years, using his Senate majority to block everything Obama wanted to get done. At this time, we also saw the rise of the Tea Party Republicans in the House who were the precursor to the next unfortunate movement.

Trump’s MAGA. Trump wanted to halt all progress in his effort to Make America Great Again. Compromise was completely dead by this point and progress had slowed from a crawl to a full stop. Trump’s administration even worked to undo existing progress.

All of this created a period of time where America didn’t have the progressive change it typically would. Which in turn has led to a continually increasing progressive base; people frustrated over problems not being solved.

The younger the generation, the less progress they’ve witnessed. Problems go unsolved, schools continue to get shot up, they’re told that their modern views are wrong and that they need to be more “traditional”.

The country has failed these generations and ignored them for too long. Now they’ve reached voting age and soon they will be the largest voting age group in America.

They broadly want:

• Federal Gun Regulation

• Abortion Rights

• LGBTQ Acceptance/Rights

• Better Pay

• Environmental Protections

• More Fair Wealth Distribution

• Healthcare

• Education - that doesn’t cause lifelong debt

• Free School Lunches

• Parental Leave

They want everything the GOP is fighting against. That is how out of touch the Republican Party is. And they shouldn’t be. The top people in the Republican party met years ago to discuss how their base was shrinking. They knew it was happening. But their answer wasn’t to shift any opinions to be more inline with the population. They had important donors who were paying for specific positions from their politicians. Instead they worked to figure out how to engineer a better outcome.

2024 just so happens to be exactly 20 years from the last time the Republican party won the Presidential popular vote. Yet, they had been doing much better in percentage of Congressional seats. This was largely thanks to gerrymandering.

The GOP has the best district designers in the business. When you can take a dense Democrat population and split it up across many Republican districts, you can completely silence your opponent.

It also helps when you’ve been systematically building a coalition of Republican leaning judicial systems across the nation. Many gerrymandered districts have gone to court, most have lost.

Maybe that was really their downfall. Republicans had learned how to stay in power without supporting the wants and needs of Americans. The GOP may have felt that it had set up such a strong control system that they would hold power forever and could get away with anything. 

Turns out there is a limit. When you refuse to enact gun regulation no matter how many school shootings happen. Then people get fed up with the government.

They don’t want change, they need it.

So those “indoctrinated” youth begin marching the streets. And protesting in their state legislation chamber because before they could even finish grieving, the legislature was working to pass a bill to loosen gun laws.

So powerful is their movement that it caught not only national attention. It caught the hearts of three of their state leaders, who stood with the protestors instead of against them. Two of those courageous politicians have now been expelled by their own assembly. The good news is that in the wake of all of this, the state has now decided to hold off hearing those gun bills for one year.

Over in Wisconsin, Gen Z was a big driving force behind voting in a Democrat to the state supreme court, giving the Democrats the court majority for the first time in 15 years. The biggest factor for voters in that race, abortion rights. Wisconsin currently has a near ban with the only exception being if the mother’s life is at risk. 

The election was a major upset for Republicans and has raised their alarm bells, although apparently not loud enough. Yesterday, a conservative judge in Texas entered a ruling on a case which makes an abortion pill illegal nationwide. The government has one week to get an appeal in, which they certainly will. 

Just like in Tennessee, immediately on the heels of a major defining moment, the Republican party digs its feet in, but in the wrong position. This is how they have viewed politics since Trump came along. They love to say they “stand up for Real America”, yet they actually obstruct America to support a fringe minority view.

There is no better example of that than Florida:

• Banning drag shows

• Preventing talk of sexuality in schools (Don’t say Gay)

• Censoring books

• Loosening Gun Laws - now open carry

• Controlling school curriculum

• Controlling discussion of race in schools

• Making political bloggers register with the state

• Strict abortion laws

Florida has become the pride of the far right while being the example of what the left is fighting against. 

It isn’t that the youth have been “indoctrinated”. It is that they see all of the outdated and often horrible positions that the GOP is taking. They watched what Trump did to America. They’ve experienced gun violence. They had states try to get in the way of their own voting rights.

The youth are voting for their future. A future where the Republican culture war takes a back seat to progress.