Do Republicans Need a Youth-Outreach Strategy?

I was at CPAC today to speak on a panel about conservatives and young people. (Perhaps the only real subject that I, as a 24-year-old, can claim to have any real expertise on — the direct result of my “lived experience,” as the kids say.) It was a great conversation, kicked off by a barn burner of a speech from Congressman Byron Donalds (R., Fla.), and ranging in topics from Republican youth-outreach strategies to obligatory, standard-issue “kids these days” grouching.

As I said on the panel, as a social conservative, I’m instinctively skeptical when I hear Republicans talk about “trying to win young people.” More often than not, that tends to mean softening our stance on culture-war issues, which I think is silly. And as a practical matter, Republicans don’t usually win young voters anyway. We should go fishing where the fish are. 

But that’s not always true. According to exit polls, Ronald Reagan dominated with the youngest voting demographic in 1984, winning 18- to 24-year-olds by 61 percent to Walter Mondale’s 39 percent — an even higher margin of victory than his overall landslide win, which was 59 to 41 percent. George H. W. Bush won the same demographic by six points, although he may have been running on Reagan’s fumes. Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign — the first campaign after the national voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 — defied expectations, on the heels of an aggressive youth outreach from the Nixon camp: “Democrats were confident that it would be a bonanza for their candidate, George McGovern,” Frederic Frommer wrote of the voting-age eligibility change in the Washington Post. But “in the end, Nixon wound up getting nearly half of the vote of the young first-time voters.”

To be clear, that doesn’t mean Republicans should expect to win the youth vote anytime soon — or even that they should make it a major aspect of their campaign strategy. But they can (and must) do better than their current showing, which is abysmal. And more to the point, they need to learn to speak to the issues that young voters care about — declining marriage and birth rates, less upward mobility, and barriers to homeownership. Those issues aren’t just youth issues; they’re American issues. They’re also a ticking electoral time bomb — if Millennials and Generation Z don’t get married, buy houses, and have children, it will be a disaster for the GOP. The numbers don’t lie: “Among homeowners who voted, Trump beat Clinton in the 2016 election by a margin of six percentage points,” the Washington Post reported. But “Clinton won the renter vote by 30 percentage points.”

Here’s a brief clip from my panel: