Electorate Shifts Left

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The chart above demonstrates something else. Conservatives have a double problems with millennial voters. The first is that they’re much less white than older voters, which means that, as time goes on, Republicans would need to get much higher voting margins among millennial whites merely to stay even. But the second problem is that millennial whites have more liberal views than older whites. Support for smaller government polls in the +40-to-+50 range among Generation X and Baby Boomer whites, but only +13 among millennial whites. Universal health insurance polls at around -20 points among older whites, but only -10 among millennial whites.

The conservative political analyst Sean Trende has argued that Republicans could return to parity even without repairing their standing among nonwhite voters by increasing their share of the white vote. Republicans may not have yet hit their ceiling of white support. But their most loyal white voters are aging out of the electorate (that’s a demographic euphemism for “dying”) while the white voters aging into the electorate are the least loyal to the party. And the change is happening fast – the proportion of millennials is expected, per Nate Cohn, to rise from about 18 percent of the voters in 2012 to 24 percent of the voters in 2016.