(04-10-2015 04:12 PM)Hambone10 Wrote: I tend to get my data from people with things like 'Doctor' and 'Professor' and 'Chief Economist' associated with them not 'The Tank'. I then form my own opinions.
But as an aside, reading his comments above, he seems to think that the key is winning three states... which has nothing to do with winning with millenials.... ESPECIALLY in that one of those states is Florida which skews older. I also don't see that Ohio or Virginia are particularly attractive to 20-30 year olds (any more than any other) which means that according to him, perhaps 90% of those millenials are in states that don't matter one bit.
The key is ABSOLUTELY winning a few states... not winning ANY particular age demographic.
I do know political operatives on both sides of the aisle being a corporate lawyer. Believe me - there is quite a difference in their PR spin in public versus the data that they use internally to actually plot strategy.
Regardless, you're somewhat right that it's ultimately not about Millennials (as that's more of a long-term issue as opposed to a short-term issue), but it's also not about "Joe Six Pack" (i.e. white working class males). The Republicans do NOT have a turnout problem - it boggles my mind that there are people in the party that actually believe this. They were highly motivated to defeat Obama in 2012 and their high turnout was NOT enough because they couldn't combine it with the swing voters.
There's one demographic that matters more than any other: affluent suburban women. Those are the people that decide Ohio, Virginia and Florida. Not Millennials. Not working class voters. Not social conservatives. Not African-Americans. Not Hispanics. Not liberals. Bill Clinton's political team correctly identified soccer moms as the new key voting bloc (as opposed to the white working class males that politicians traditionally obsessed over) back in 1992 and that has held true in every single presidential election ever since then. They're the ones that re-elected George W. Bush over John Kerry because of national security concerns and they're the ones that voted Obama into office twice because they sympathize with his social stances more. They live in higher income households that would sympathize with Republican fiscal and tax policies, but are strongly in favor of Democratic social policies (particularly on gay marriage and abortion), which is why they're true independent voters right in the middle of the political spectrum.
Every political operative that actually has to analyze data, whether they're Republican or Democrat, knows this. I've pointed this out before: just watch the messaging at the conventions for both parties. They're full weeks of speaker upon speaker upon speaker with laser-like targeting toward suburban women.
My semi-educated guess is that the super-majority of people posting on this board are male. At the end of the day, we're literally the least valuable votes in the entire presidential election process. (Mid-term Congressional elections are a different story.) Our wives, girlfriends and significant others, though, are the ones that really hold the power (particularly if you live in a legit swing state).
So, what are Republicans doing to attract suburban women? What is the plan from the people on this board that actually want to win presidential elections to target that group? That is what actually takes strategic thinking beyond, "This is what I believe and therefore we just need to turnout more people that agree with me" that seems to permeate too much of the Republican Party right now. The GOP is acting like the Democrats circa 2004, where all they could agree on was that they hated Bush while the MoveOn.org crowd openly funded leftist challengers to more mainstream candidates with broader appeal but supposedly "not liberal enough". (Call me crazy, but history seems to be repeating itself on the other side of the aisle.) Love him or hate him, Karl Rove actually knew how to get messages out to suburban women where he could make a compelling case to them that national security would trump any concerns that they had about Republican stances on abortion and other other social issues.
Since 2008, though, the Democrats have been absolutely destroying the Republicans in this demo. We have seen two straight primaries where Republicans just ignored suburban women concerns for months (instead fighting about whether the mainstream candidate is conservative enough) and then start scrambling at the convention to change their tone since they know that they'll lose all swing states without that demo. In contrast, Democrats target their message to suburban women from the very beginning of the primaries, and that pays off months later in the general election since there's a much higher trust factor there. I fear that we're looking at a repeat of this in the 2016 primaries - at the very least, Ted Cruz is going to push the more mainstream candidates to state things that they don't really want being emphasized in the general election (and believe me, the support that the GOP candidates voiced for the Indiana RFRA over the past couple of weeks will come back to bite them next year).
Everyone has their own personal political beliefs and our brains are hardwired to make us perceive that we're "middle of the road" and "reasonable". We (collectively as people) have TERRIBLE self-recognition of where we actually fall within the national political spectrum in relation to others - pretty much everyone thinks that they're more moderate than they are in reality. If anything, the more you follow politics, the more disjointed you become from the true middle. My dad has always followed politics heavily with strong and articulate views on all issues... and has voted straight-ticket Republican for the last 40 years. Meanwhile, my mom - an affluent suburban woman - doesn't follow politics at all. She'll watch a handful of speeches in the weeks before the election and then make a decision. Yet, she has ended up voting for EVERY single presidential winner since she was eligible to vote, whether they were Republican or Democrat. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. She loved Ronald Reagan, she loved Bill Clinton, she loved George W. Bush, and she loves Obama. That might sound crazy to any of us here when looking at all of their respective political positions, yet her personal preferences (that unquantifiable subjective feeling of who would be a better leader) have more predictive power for presidential elections than any in-depth objective political analysis of the issues. (Note that she loves Hillary Clinton.) That's just a personal anecdote, but it pertains to the much greater data set: don't think of who you would vote for, but rather who your mom, wife, sister or girlfriend would vote for and why they vote the way that they do. They are gold when it comes to presidential elections, while pretty much everyone on this board (whether conservative, liberal or in between) is a commodity.