Aimed at the party’s youth.
Aimed at the party’s youth
E xpecting a bad result in the midterms, Republicans are getting ready for one of their recurring battles for the soul of the party. What’s striking is that this is a generational battle. The leaders of the party increasingly seem to be at war with the party’s youth and future.
Among Republicans age 45 and older, 72 percent say the decision to go to war with Iran was the right one, and 53 percent say it was worth the costs. Among Republicans younger than 45, 48 percent call the war wrong, and only 20 percent think that the costs were justified — with fully 40 percent unsure. That is, 40 percent who aren’t willing to let their partisan identity make their conclusion for them. The data come from the latest New York Times/Siena poll.
Younger and older Republicans look at the Iran war as if they’ve been prescribed completely different eyewear. In the long run, younger voters are going to win this, not only because generational turnover is now the literal shoveling of dirt in graveyards filling with Boomers, but because independents agree with them.
Young Republicans were told, with some emphasis, that the era of directionless conflict in the Middle East was over. They were offered a GOP that would stop spending blood and treasure in corners of the world where America’s interests were marginal and its prospects for success even more so. A significant share of them voted for that party.
Seventy-one percent of Republicans younger than 45 say the country should focus on domestic issues rather than engage actively abroad. Among Republicans 45 and older, that number inverts: 53 percent favor active engagement, 40 percent want to come home.
And it’s not just foreign policy.
In January, President Trump offered what may be the most candid statement of political economy that any Republican president has made in recent memory. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down,” he said. “I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes.” It was an honest remark, and the honesty is the problem.
Since the pandemic, home prices have risen roughly 50 percent. The median home now costs $405,000. To qualify for a mortgage on that home, a household should have an income of approximately $120,000. The median American household income is $85,000. The median age of the first-time homebuyer, which for decades held steady somewhere between 29 and 31, has climbed to 40.
The president’s proposed solutions on housing amount to a demand-side intervention in a supply-side crisis. Lower interest rates and 50-year mortgages do not build houses. They add buyers to a market already starved of inventory, which means they increase upward pressure on prices. Economists across the ideological spectrum agree that the problem is construction, and that the administration’s tariffs and its immigration enforcement, whatever their other merits, make construction materially more expensive.
MAGA presented itself, not unreasonably, as an insurgency against a failed establishment. In its second incarnation, it has begun to look increasingly like that establishment’s more boisterous sibling: The Boomers are seeing their assets soar in value and their foreign policy preferences carried out, while younger voters are paying $5 a gallon for gas and waiting to climb the property ladder while being lectured about avocado toast and take-out coffee.
Conservatism is supposed to be about preserving and building on an inheritance. A conservative party can survive losing elections and arguments. I’m not sure a conservative party can survive the creeping sense that it was a vehicle through which an older generation preyed upon the young.
Once again, Republicans need an exit strategy from a war of choice — a war on their youngest voters.