Quote:There was a time not so long ago when the young seemed destined to be liberal forever. Americans in their teens and 20s were to the left of their elders on social issues. They worried more about poverty. They voted strongly Democratic.

In retrospect, we refer to this period as the 1960s, and it didn’t last long, let alone forever. Less than a generation after young people were marching for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, they voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan.

Today, of course, the young are liberal again, and it seems as if they will be forever. They favor same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, stricter gun laws, citizenship for illegal immigrants and an activist government that fights climate change and inequality. The Republican Party, as you have probably noticed, does not.

But the temporary nature of the 1960s should serve as a reminder that politics change. What seems permanent can become fleeting. And the Democratic Party, for all its strengths among Americans under 40, has some serious vulnerabilities, too.

In the simplest terms, the Democrats control the White House (and, for now, the Senate) at a time when the country is struggling. Economic growth has been disappointing for almost 15 years now. Most Americans think this country is on the wrong track. Our foreign policy often seems messy and complex, at best.

To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/upshot...ot&hp&_r=1

Maybe there is some hope for the generation after the millennials (whatever it is called).

Can young people grow up to eventually vote Republican? Yes, just as the liberal Baby Boomers of the 1960s eventually voted en masse for Reagan in the 1980s. Bad economies are generally bad for the incumbent party in power at the time regardless of what people may think on all of the other issues.

However, whether they'll be "conservative" is a bit different. There's effectively zero chance that younger people will somehow be more conservative on social issues like gay marriage, immigration, abortion or marijuana usage. Each generation is progressively more liberal on those issues than the last one and that's only going to be exacerbated with the larger shares of Hispanics and Asians within the nation's population. Every time that the Republicans use those social wedge issues is another roadblock to getting any type of traction with younger voters. Anyone that thinks that's going to change is fooling themselves with the changing demographics of this country.

As they get older, though, people naturally have a lot more invested in the nation's overall economy: they're now paying taxes, dealing with mortgages and real estate prices, seeing stock portfolios rise and fall, etc. Fiscal issues start becoming more of a focus compared to social issues when your own money is directly on the line. Republicans can certainly win over those voters with the right policies AND a sound electoral strategy.

Of course, too many Republican primary voters still seem hell-bent on messing up the latter "electoral strategy" part of the equation. Note that the economy was still quite crappy in 2012 yet Obama still won in an electoral college landslide. That should be a warning shot to Republicans that they'll need to effectively drop their social agenda altogether (or at least temper it where it's generally irrelevant to their electoral strategy) if they want to get more than 49% of the vote no matter how bad the economy might be.

I can't emphasize this enough as a Republican that works a lot with young people that actually make a good amount of money and would historically been great targets for the GOP in the past: the image of right wing social conservatives make voting Republican a complete non-starter for them even if GOP tax and economic policies would directly aid them financially. The fact that so many people in the red states don't see this because they're in the political echo chamber where the vast majority of people around them are hard core Republicans (so they perceive that "everyone" must feel the way that they do because that's how everyone in their personal social circles think) continues to drive me nuts (and fear that this will doom us to still be talking about President Hillary here 10 years from now).