Why Republicans Lose Younger Voters

Scott Walker. File photo by Kate Golden of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker thinks he knows the answer to why conservative Dan Kelly took such a thumping in the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“Younger voters are the issue,” he declared on Twitter.

“It comes from years of radical indoctrination – on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture. We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”

Or as he noted in an interview with Fox, UW-Madison has 50,000 students and “in Dane County 82% of the votes went for the radicals.”

It’s hard to know which part of this comment is sillier: that winning candidate Janet Protasiewicz is a radical for supporting policies like abortion rights and fair maps that a significant majority of Wisconsin voters approve. Or the idea that booming Dane County, the fastest growing area in Wisconsin, is just a place where students vote. If students accounted for as much as 20% of the 198,000 or so people in the county voting for Protasiewicz, that would be a surprise.

Of course Walker now runs Young America’s Foundation, a nonprofit that works to popularize conservative ideas among young people, so his exaggerated comments are a catchy way to promote and raise support for the group.

Still, there is a huge problem for the Republican Party, one of aging demographics. And it’s about far more than just college voters. As Urban Milwaukee has reported, past polls by Charles Franklin for the Marquette Law School have found a starkly consistent difference between older and younger voters in the state. Among Generation Z (those born since 1997) 54% identity as Democrats or “lean Democrat,” versus just 36% who identify as Republican or lean Republican. Among Millennials (born 1981 to 1996), 50% identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, versus just 39% who identify as Republican or lean Republican.

That includes all voters 41 and under in Wisconsin.

However, those younger voters have typically had a much lower turnout than Generation X, Baby Boomer and Greatest Generation voters. And the lowest has been for college-age voters.

But the race for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court had an unprecedented turnout on college campuses, as Ben Wikler, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told Urban Milwaukee. “What we saw this spring was a student voter uprising. On some campuses there was a higher turnout than for the November midterms.”

Wikler says two key factors drove this turnout: the abortion issue and “a historic investment in turning out younger voters.”

He notes there are 320,000 college students in Wisconsin, a state that has seen many elections that were decided by less than 30,000 voters. “Treating young voters as a critical constituency in an off-year election turns out to make all the difference in the world. Normally in spring elections campaigns assume young voters won’t turn out.”

But not this time. A new group called Project 72 Wisconsin, launched by former state Democratic Party chair Mike Tate, had more than 100 staff working to turn out young voters. “It operated on a scale never before seen in Wisconsin,” Wikler ways. “Combined with a big push by other groups and the Democratic Party, they were able to reach students at saturation level.”

As Politico reported, “On the 15 college campuses Project 72 canvassed over the last few months, turnout was far higher than the overall participation rate statewide.”

But as important as the college voters were, they are part of a far bigger group, of all Millennial and Gen Z voters, who “are unlikely to vote for a 2024 presidential candidate who holds different views than them on abortion, gun safety, climate, systemic racism and the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” as Politico warned, citing the results of years of polls of these two generations by John Della Volpe. As he put it, “The challenge that Republicans have is that their current MAGA values are misaligned, to put it lightly, with the values that these two generations hold.”

“Until the GOP de-radicalizes,” Wikler warns, “they are going to be alienating these generations that will define the next half century of American politics.”

But Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state Republican Party, doesn’t seem to think the party need change its views at all, even after Kelly lost so badly. “I don’t think we have to sacrifice our principles in order to talk to independent voters,” Jefferson told the Journal Sentinel. “I’m pro-life. I’m proud to be a part of the pro-life party. But I think we need to have a message and explain ourselves better than we have.”

Not every Republican in the state has taken the same tack. Many have called for the party to move past Donald Trump. But it’s worth noting the party did a famous “autopsy” of the 2012 presidential defeat which called for the party to become more inclusive and appeal more to younger voters and women, only to see Republicans move in the opposite direction, becoming more extreme.

In the process they have increasingly alienated the millennial and Gen Z Americans who “came of age after 9/11, and through years marked by recession, mass shootings, climate catastrophes and pitched debates about economic inequality and systemic racism,” as Politico notes.

Walker’s contention that today’s college students are the product of “indoctrination” entirely misses the point of how personal the abortion issue is for them. “The idea that someone would have to be indoctrinated to care about having freedom of access to their own bodies suggests that Scott Walker might be indoctrinated himself,” says Wikler.

The irony is that the organization Walker runs has this mission statement: “Young America’s Foundation is committed to ensuring that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom.”