SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Daniel McGraw writes that based on their demographic characteristics the Democratic and Republican parties face two very different futures. There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older and far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, McGraw calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. About 2.3 million of President Barack Obama’s voters have died too but that leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats. “I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”
Frey points out that, since Republicans are getting whiter and older, replacing the voters that leave this earth with young ones is essential for them to be competitive in presidential elections. "Millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.” Exit polling indicates that millennials have split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday May 20 2015, @06:18PM
Find a copy (probably on Netflix) of Ken Burn's Civil War documentary and watch it. Observe the letters ordinary enlisted men were writing, mostly with 'elementary school' level educations. Do you think more than one in a thousand modern eighth grade students could write (or even read) on that level?
That's an interesting point, but I wonder how representative the soldiers who wrote those letters were of their demographics. I'm wondering if what we see in The Civil War is more like what a documentarian in 100 years might find on Soylent today or the old site 15 years ago. Twitter and Reddit would never make it into a documentary unless it were about the banality of the web 2.0 period.
(Also last I checked, The Civil War among other interesting Ken Burns documentaries like The Dust Bowl and Prohibition are on Netflix.)
That being said, I've noticed there are many, many people who are simply allergic to written communication or discussing anything in the abstract. I think I may have some Googling to do to see if I can find out what the demographics of your point may be and compare to present. I'm tempted to dismiss things that sound too much like accounts of the Men of Númenor of the Second Age, but the more frustrated I become with people who are functionally illiterate and incapable of engaging their higher mental faculties the easier it is to be tempted to believe there actually was a Second Age.
Of course not, they will be ruled; the only remaining question is who shall rule them.
This is one thing that drives me nuts about Americans, and from what I've been hearing, it's not just a flyover country problem. It shocks me how people avoid jury duty for example. Voter turnout! Don't even get me started! Utter failure to understand the underpinnings of the federal republic form of government specified in the US Constitution. I'll bet if I asked the average person off the street about the Articles of Confederation they'd think I was talking about the subject of that documentary we were just talking about! It's rah rah freedoms rah democracy but the people seem to have no chops for it.
Indeed, a republic if you can keep it, and there seem to be very few interested in even doing the basics to keep it.