Ride Of The Young Guns

The College Republican National Committee (yeah, who knew, right?) is blasting the GOP leadership over the increasing loss of America's young voters in a new report examining what went wrong with 2012 and voters under 35.

In the report, the young Republican activists acknowledge their party has suffered significant damage in recent years. A sampling of the critique on:

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”

Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”

Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”

Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”

Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

“[The] Republican Party has won the youth vote before and can absolutely win it again,” the report says, pointing to presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who were competitive with that demographic. “But this will not occur without significant work to repair the damage done to the Republican brand among this age group over the last decade.”

So in order to win over young voters, the GOP has to be...more like the Democrats.  Considering the Democrats have already staked out this territory, good luck with that, kids.  Republicans are a dead-end party that will not go gentle in that teabag night until the Tea Party cancer is ripped out and disposed of.  That's going to take getting rid of them at both the national and the state level, and the latter part of that isn't going to happen for another decade or so at the minimum.

Meanwhile, the country will try to survive the storm, I guess.  But if the future of the GOP has basically given up on the party as a going concern, and their big idea to save the party is "We need to pretend to be more like the Democrats on social stuff and still stick it to poor people" then I'm betting that when the rubble clears, the Democrats will have a long run ahead of them.

The issue of course is how much of the country gets reduced to that rubble in the meantime.