The Crossed Pond

Making the rounds on the blogosphere this morning is Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of the youth vote.

This is key. I am glad that some conservatives are taking the economic crisis as a cue and reason for losing. But the very, very critical point they ought to take from it is not that they lost because of a bad luck event that was out of their control, but because when the event hit (and then the subsequent bailout reaction), they had no economic message to counter it with. The Democrats had “protect the middle class” and “main street vs. Wall Street”, and from the Republicans…well, if you can parse out a counter-argument from John McCain, you’re a smarter man than I. And of course, the party leadership was even worse, having spent the last 8 years largely giving up the ghost on any economically conservative and cohesive narrative. The only opposition from House Republicans attempting to raise a conservative voice was kneecapped from all sides.

It wasn’t bad luck on the economy that shot them down, it was the total lack of message.

All that said, in 2004 and 2000 the elections were widely seen as hinging on evangelicals. Over the last two years, we have seen evangelical influence scattered to the winds. The swing vote this election, and what decided the race…was the youth.

Ruffini:

People have been focusing on whether the youth vote was up. It was — slightly: going from 17 to 18 percent. But the real story about the youth vote is not how many “new” voters Obama got to show up. It’s how he produced a gargantuan 25% swing among existing young voters, or those who were sure to vote for the first time anyway.

How big?

18 percent times a 25 percent increase in the Democratic margin equals 4.5 points, or a majority of Obama’s popular vote margin. Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004’s already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.

So, to clarify here: Obama’s youth margin = 73 electoral votes. Without the economic crisis, this would have been the difference.

And that is the narrative coming out of this election (or the one that serious GOP strategists ought to be taking).

In some ways, this is at least in part a result of the evangelical swing that won them the last two. But I feel it’s much, much more endemic of that. The Rovian GOP created a short-lived majority on the basis of slash-and-burn tactics, appealing to an older and narrower minority of the GOP base. They did indeed successfully mobilize those elements, but at the direct expense of minimizing the brand and inviting a pushback far, far more significant than their brief breath of absolute power.

The generation before me had the movement conservatism and a rebellion against their baby boomer parents.

I grew up when that culminated, in the Reagan era, reaching its epoch in the 1994 Contract With America masterstroke. In those days, conservatism, while I wouldn’t call it “cool”, had a definite draw—liberalism looked stale by comparison.

These current and upcoming generations grew up under Clinton, and became politically aware under Bush, and will now harden under Barack Obama. One guess how that’s going to calibrate them.

Rove et al got their small victories, but the price is going to be very high indeed. And what’ scary is you can’t really count on the youth to vote. But they did—and people get exponentially more likely to vote as they get older (and once they start voting).

The people that handed Obama this election are now voting citizens, and their generational chunk of the electorate will only increase (combining with Baby Boomers reaching the highest turnout voting age). What’s more, teh gays and teh minorities are forming a bigger bigger chunk themselves. It’s not impossible to win them for Republicans—as minorities mainstream, they become better off and often become more conservative—but not when the party of conservatism is activated disproportionately by old white Southerns and that, not an active message, is increasingly the banner they march under.

Society is growing more progressive, minorities are becoming the majorities, and the young have a new taste for politics. Republican trends, unfortunately, are trending in the opposite direction, and this election may just be the start, not the pinnacle, of all those trends.

There’s a wrecking ball coming for House that Bush Built. The question is whether party insiders want to chain themselves to the radiators.