The Pew Research Center is out with a poll measuring party membership:
The biggest change in partisan affiliation in recent years is the growing share of Americans who decline to affiliate with either party: 39% call themselves independents, 32% identify as Democrats and 23% as Republicans, based on aggregated data from 2014.
For both parties, youth is the future.
Millennials continue to be the most Democratic age cohort; 51% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 35% who identify with the GOP or lean Republican. There are only slight differences in partisan affiliation between older and younger millennials. Republicans have a four-point lead among the Silent Generation (47%-43%), the most Republican age cohort.
Not so good news for the GOP. If these trends continue … but of course, both parties will adjust to attract new adherents. The problem for the GOP is that they have become a haven for positions unpopular with the Millenials. I suspect the first problem will be inflexibility, as the partisan politics practiced by the GOP on the President, even in the foreign policy arena, have been well-publicized by the GOP and its supporters for decades now. Their raucous approach may now be circling around to bite off their tails. After that, particular positions will fall: gay marriage, ObamaCare. However, possibly the most difficult will be ridding themselves of the perception that they do not relate well with reality. When will they discard their objections to climate change? I know that, prior to the Gingrich era, I had respect for the Republicans – they raised objections, they voted against Democratic bills, but they also understood that governing was an important duty, not a game to be played and won. They had interesting ideas, and they conducted themselves honorably. 21st century Republicans dig in their heels, refuse to permit judicial appointments on the most slender of grounds, and are profligate with the public purse when they are in control, feeding the special interests supporting them. Taking the military budget as a proxy for defense industry subsidization, the Council on Foreign Relations provides this chart:
The Democrats, on the other hand, must learn how to better promote their successes. How many of them ran on the successful passage of ObamaCare? Not many, especially in heavily contested areas – and they lost the House, and then the Senate. Of course, they might have anyways, but taking the opportunity of an election to provide further education on ObamaCare would have been the brave and right thing to do. That, and pull in their own profligacy, are two of the challenges they face.
A former colleague of mine happens to have run for State legislature seats, and has attended caucuses of both Parties. His observation is that the most extreme attend these meetings: in the Republicans, anti-taxer who won’t hear a word for a tax; in the Democrats, every possible cause you can think of needs government funding, preferably unlimited.
Are the Millenials going to find this appetizing? Does it even make sense to ask a loosely knit (if at all – the whole “generation” thing has never made much sense to me) group such a question? The next few years – and their polls – should be quite interesting. So will the creaking as the Parties try to adjust, against the howls of the old-timers.
