College Republicans Call for Triage

I’ve landed in Nashville. I’m sure I’ll be seeing some of you at the YDA conference tomorrow. For the rest of you, I’ll be live-blogging as I can depending on the WiFi access, which wasn’t all that great at the last YDA conference.

Over at The Next Right (sort of an “Open Left” for conservatives), Ethan Eilon, the Executive Director of the College Republicans is saying some smart things about young people and their relation ship to the GOP. Specifically, he’s calling on the Republican Party to wake up and start reaching out to young voters. The whole thing reads very much like stuff you heard out of Democratic youth circles 4 years ago (and still do today though people seem to be getting the message).

His advice to the party is good and will be familiar to many here: go where young people congregate (online), make an effort to promote effective youth leaders in the party. Address youth issues on the stump, etc. The piece is valuable reading for anyone in either party looking to court young voters. But he’s got two huge problems.

First is the straight up math of what we’re seeing now:

Now, I'm not naive enough to suggest that we make these changes and all of a sudden we are going to win the 18-19 vote 80/20, but we don't need to. We just need to not lose it by that margin, which is exactly what current trends, if left unchecked, will yield.

That’s really the crux of it. There’s very little chance that the Republicans will eat into Democratic gains among Millennials unless the Democrats drop youth outreach altogether and/or severely mess something up policy wise. McCain was probably the best candidate choice for Republicans to make an attempt at courting youth, but eve he won’t be enough and he’ll likely have little influence down-ticket in an environment so toxic to traditional Republicans. The GOP is now in the unenviable position of doing electoral triage for a generation. It’s not about winning anymore; it’s about losing as little (young) blood as possible.

The problem is that the Republican brand is not just tarnished – that in itself is a tough hurdle to overcome (see Democrats: National Security) – but the governing philosophies of conservatism itself are rejected by Millennials. That’s why this is more than a little wishful thinking:

We need to get very serious about making our brand more appealing to young voters, and to get young people bought into the overall concept of what this party is about: limited government and individual liberty. This is not a hard sell, but when the Democrats and their affiliates are outspending us in the demographic by 25 to 1 we are going to have an uphill battle.

Culture war issues promoted by the Republican Party restrict individual liberty (gay rights, right to choose, etc.) in ways that the multicultural, tolerant Millennials find repellent, and limited government is a failed proposition. For a generation that lived through Katrina (and exhortations from Grover Norquist to “drown the government in a bathtub), limited government fails to recognize the responsibility that a government has to its citizens to provide opportunity and security. These will not be winning talking points for reaching out to today’s youngest voters.

Finally, I would just like to point out that the 25 – 1 number cited by Eilon is highly disputable. The College Republicans had well over $20 million in expenditures over the last 4 years: dwarfing spending by the College and Young Democrats (from Open Secrets):

And while it is true that Democrats have focused far more than Republicans on GOTV in recent years, the amount of money going through the conservative leadership pipeline is about 5 – 10 times more than what equivalent progressive organizations have to work with. Campus Progress thoroughly debunked similar claims made by Young America Foundation Alum Jason Mattera earlier this year (below). There are rumors that the CRNC is nothing more than a money funnel conservatives use to direct money to other “grown up” projects, and that the College Republicans actually see little to no of their tens of millions raised/spent. So perhaps there is a grain of truth here, but if so doesn’t that just speak to the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party?