Report from a Suburban High School: Will GOP Lose Another Generation?
The suburban neighborhood where I live can best be described as a Republican politician’s dream come true—upper-middle class; over 80% Caucasian; neatly-trimmed lawns; a chicken in every pot and a Lincoln Navigator in every garage. All this, and situated just within a county that has voted Republican in every national election but two since 1960. My neighborhood is white bread America to the core, a true bastion of conservatism.
But what about the town’s high school?
It should come as no surprise that in the 2008 election Barack Obama won the youth vote (that’s 18% of the total) by a handy two-to-one margin. The commonly accepted belief is that Obama’s youth and charm turned out young voters in droves, many of whom see the GOP as an institution of the past.
I recently polled 37 of my peers (high school sophomores, juniors and seniors) to see if this belief held true in the Bible Belt South.
Participants in the survey were asked a series of four questions: whether or not they identified with a political party (if yes, which); what they thought when they heard the word ‘conservative;’ what they thought when they heard the word ‘Republican;’ and which news pundits they liked and disliked.
The answers I received were varied in opinion and alarming in implication.
The first question I asked provided the most mundane answer: of the polled, eight identified with the Republican Party, eight identified with the Democratic Party, eighteen gave no affiliation and three identified with ‘other’ (a libertarian and two socialists). Where it counts, the data was an even tear down the middle.
The last question was similarly split along party lines, but was also noteworthy for the misinformed nature of its answers, not exactly surprising considering the demographic: one of those polled, a self-described Democrat, proclaimed that she “loved Bill O’Reilly” (a glutton for pain, perhaps?). Another, a self-described Republican, stated—bizarrely—that his favorite political pundit was Jim Cramer from Mad Money.
It’s the other pair of questions, sandwiched between the two above, that reach the real meat of the matter. I broke the answers down into three categories—positive, negative and neutral / apathetic.
Far and away the most populous category was the last, with seventeen answers. This is in keeping with the first question—those who don’t identify with a party will, in most cases, care less about politics than those who do. Answers I received for this group generally had to do with the Republican elephant and the color red. The most common answer was simply “I don’t know.”
The negative category came in second: fifteen answers.
That left positive answers in dead last with five, meaning the number of teens with good things to say about conservatism and the GOP was actually less than the number of teens who described themselves as Republican.
Uh-oh.
Not only that, but the most frequently-used descriptor for conservatism and the GOP (among both proponents and detractors of the movement) was—brace yourselves—George W. Bush (one responder wrote “Bush and his failures;” another “Bush and his big ears”).
Not good.
Other, equally unattractive answers included “angry people,” “people who don’t want change,” “people with old, outdated values” and—rather pithily—“old white men on a porch with shotguns.”
Not good at all.
The modern age has not been kind to Republicans. From the data, it could be argued that Republicans have not been kind to Republicans: we’ll likely pay for the mistakes of today’s conservatism when this group of young people comes of voting age.
In any case, it would seem we’ve lost this round.
All this in the Bible Belt South.