and now the GOP hass an older voter problem wrote:
Trollminator wrote:
The general vote gap is evidence of this.
The GOP now has an older voter problem. A yuge older voter problem. More older voters are planning to vote Democrat than ever in the past. The older women have been abandoning the GOP in droves.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/19/politics/the-gops-older-voter-problem/index.html
Good post. Suddenly there has been plenty of excellent voting trend analysis in this thread. That is one of my favorite angles so I'll add some more:
* No kidding senior citizens are now trending Democratic. It is simply a changing of the guard...who those seniors are. There have been tons of stupid lazy summaries over the past 20 years regarding why seniors shifted to the GOP. It was all crap. That was the Silent Generation born 1928-1945 turning senior citizen age. That block was always predisposed to think like Republicans, since they turned 18 when either a very popular Republican in Eisenhower or unpopular Democrat in Truman was in office. Truman served two terms but his average approval rating was only 45%. Eisenhower was roughly 65%. That block was Republican all their lives. The prior block the Greatest Generation was just the opposite, coming of age with either unpopular Republican in Hoover or popular Democrat in FDR. That was a Democratic block. In 1994 seniors voted heavy blue because it was that Greatest Generation voting dependably near the end of their lifespan. Then once that generation dies out and is replaced by Silent Generation as seniors, all the dunces try to explain what happened, why seniors are now voting Republican. Meanwhile it could have predicted decades earlier if you merely understood the fundamentals and weren't scrambling for some idiotic issue(s) as the trigger.
* Now with the Silent Generation reaching mortality the younger seniors are ones who turned 18 during the JFK/LBJ '60s. That is a pro Democratic block. So there is a mixture of both generations and some conflict. This cycle seniors will vote more blue than 2016, and 2020 seniors will vote more blue than 2018, simply because two more years of Silent Generation will have died out. Not particularly complicated if you understand the basics
* Hillary was never going to win big in 2016, because independents strangely preferred Trump. I noted that in every poll. The projections to Hillary winning big always depended on Republicans/conservatives not as loyal to their nominee as typical. That was never going to happen. Some early polling had as many as 15% Republicans tilting the other way. Nonsense. Once the fundamentals restored logically with Republicans coming home, Hillary was stuck in a tight race, one that James Comey pushed the other way, IMO.
* Trump won independents by 4 points. Now independents have shifted sharply the other way. They did so early in 2017. At 46% in 2016 while winning independents, and now independents preferring the other side, that's a bit problematic. We are counting to 100, not 85. On site after site I see crowing conservatives who seemingly have no clue. They want to believe 2016 was a restoration of America the way it was supposed to be, and the way people are supposed to think and vote. None of the numbers align with that tortured thinking. Millennials are becoming more reliable voters. They have a 28% approval rating of the GOP.
* One thing in Republican favor is those upper midwestern states have very low number of blacks and Hispanics. Most of them have somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90% whites. That is more like the America of the Reagan era, when whites were 90% of the electorate. However, those midwestern states have significantly higher number of liberals than other states with 80-90% whites, and fewer conservatives. If you want me to say it I will...the whites in those states are higher caliber than most states, with significantly fewer deplorables like the lady who posed the question to John McCain. Trump picked off some of those states in 2016 while Hillary slept, and all the fear and job promises from Trump worked. It is not likely to play out that way again. As I emphasized yesterday, Trump would likely need to win the national popular vote by 2% in 2020 to narrowly carry some of those states, instead of being able to swipe those states while losing nationally by 2% like 2016
* With every day Trump is stuck at 40% approval rating or nearby, the generation currently coming of age at 18 years old is conditioned to think like Democrats and register as Democrat. I'll be long gone but this new generation will be voting Democratic in 50 and 60 years, really no matter what else happens in between.