Picture yourself for a moment as the commissioner of Major League Baseball, tasked with guarding the fortunes and traditions of the national pastime. You are in Kansas City’s Kaufmann Stadium on a long, languid, humid summer afternoon enjoying a hot dog and a Boulevard Tropical Pale Ale when one of your newest underlings, an adorably awkward math major fresh out of MIT, plops down into the seat next to you with some alarming news. “Our fan base is quickly dying,” he says. He shows you a thick binder full of data that confirms your worst fears, the sort of worries you’d prefer to set aside while enjoying the Royals-Tigers game unfolding in front of you. Most of baseball’s hard-core fans—the ones who buy tickets for the games, pay $150 a month for their monthly cable subscription to catch tilts on TV, and spend their free time in fantasy leagues full of their college friends—are over fifty. Americans under thirty, especially in growing demographics like Latinx fans, are choosing soccer or basketball over baseball.
The underling is blunt. “In twenty years, we will be ice hockey,” he warns, a sport intensely beloved by a tiny minority but mostly ignored by the larger culture. “In twenty more, we’ll be boxing.”
He hands you a bullet-pointed list of ways to address this problem, refuses your offer of a beer (young people aren’t drinking much these days, after all), and walks away.
Instead of doing the sensible thing and following his advice, like ramping up youth league efforts, financing underserved communities, quickening the game’s pace, promoting the sport’s diverse stars, and perhaps placing major-league franchises in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other places where baseball remains wildly popular, you make a stunning gamble by doubling down on the sport’s core, dying demographic of older white men. You instruct teams to hold “Caucasian Nights” celebrating white culture. You eliminate wild-card playoff games, pitch clocks, and designated hitters to return to “tradition.” You lobby the government to make it harder for international players to get visas, and you appoint old white dudes with thready pulses and gray faces to every single important position of leadership in the game. You ban Latin American players from wearing jewelry or getting tattoos that represent their countries of origin. You look at the hordes of older white fans driving in from the exurbs and packing stadium after stadium, and the wall-to-wall media coverage of your antics and bask in self-satisfaction. You suddenly have a million followers on Twitter, most of whom aren’t even baseball fans but rather people who seem to enjoy human suffering. Baseball gets a little dead-cat bounce, but the future still looks grim.
If betting on a dying core demographic, deliberately alienating young people, and delighting in open, unapologetic racism seems like a total genius move to you, you’re going to love the strategy of the contemporary Republican Party in the United States. There’s really no way to sugarcoat this: the GOP is getting clobbered so badly in the competition for young voters that the party’s future looks bleaker than an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. The MIT grad has been sitting next to party leaders for years now, reading exit polls and surveys and results in election after election, warning about the extinction-level political event hurtling their way to no avail. The chimerical “victory” of Donald Trump in the 2016 election and his transformation of the Republican Party from the—wink-wink—super-secret electoral home of America’s racists to an open, frothing white power organization with fond linkages to every authoritarian, right-wing nationalist group on the planet has momentarily rescued the GOP from its demographic destiny. The Trump era has given hope to reactionaries who have long dreamed of reimposing their vision of white, male dominance on the country, and legitimacy to a long list of far-right crackpots who once operated at the margins of society. And if Trump and the Republicans were polling ahead, or even respectably, with young people, I’d be genuinely worried as I scroll through property listings in Ontario.
But they aren’t. Even as the US economy hummed along with its lowest levels of unemployment in forty years, as the stock market reached new heights, the Republican Party remains about as popular as tooth extraction with everyone under the age of forty. They see America as a society dominated by conservatives since their parents were children, and blame baby boomers and Gen Xers for systematically looting the country and burning down the bridges that once led to success and prosperity immediately after crossing them. Once upon a time, you could pursue affordable higher education for next to nothing, support a family, and buy a house with a few years of hard work and savings. Now, you have to take out fifty grand in crippling loans just to get through college, even at many flagship state universities that were once effectively free, and the world that confronts you when you get out is harrowing. The best jobs are in major cities, where everything feels up-charged. Real wages in many industries haven’t increased in decades, and more and more of your limited income gets eaten up by health-care costs and housing, even as your callous elders mock you for the avocado toast and lattes that you can’t afford and don’t buy anyway.
Worse, too many people over the age of forty-five seem not to get it. They don’t understand why they can’t call you “hot lips” anymore or make jokes about Polish people or imitate foreign accents, and they are outraged at the idea of a woman being the lead in the new James Bond movie, and they think older brothers and dads exist to protect the virtue of young women, and they quietly (or not-so-quietly since the election of Trump) believe that the plight of poor folks and minorities is their own fault because they don’t work hard enough and that young people are “snowflakes” who were given participation trophies just for showing up and whose brains were warped in childhood by parents who told them how special they were and that kids should know what the world is really like and that most of them are not special at all and they should not be told fairy tales about equality and justice, and they are tired of having their Thanksgiving soliloquies about Ronald Reagan ruined by the sour attitudes of their kid’s punk social justice warrior girlfriend or boyfriend, and they have nothing against Muslims or Africans—they were nice to one of them just last week!—but they think it’s all gone too far, and that somewhere soon they are going to encounter a transgender Syrian activist in the bathroom and that, that, that’s why they voted for Trump, and even though sometimes he should shut up on Twitter and stop whining, everything he is doing is basically fine and overdue, and maybe the kids will understand someday, even if they don’t now. It’s all for their own good.
Well, the reality is that, every minute, about twenty people who think like that draw their final breath and expire, and then they are simultaneously replaced in the eligible voting pool by an eighteen-year-old with a Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, membership and a Jacobin subscription and an unsustainably high college tuition bill and in the general population by another baby that will have something like a 67 percent chance of growing up to be a leftist. The basic dynamic is a Republican Party increasingly dominated by and aligned with a dying white demographic and a Democratic Party that is not exactly beloved but is grudgingly supported come election time by overwhelming majorities of young people who haven’t yet voted in numbers sufficient enough to make anyone take notice. And it is in the process of transforming our politics in ways long dreamed about by Democratic strategists and theorists, whose visions of “demographic destiny” may be accelerated by the galloping stupidity, insufferable, unearned arrogance, and legendary incompetence of the Trump administration.
That American politics is on the verge of a major disruption is, and should be, pretty hard to believe. The United States has been described for decades as “closely divided” politically, and the description today is still quite apt. Neither party’s candidate has won more than 53 percent of the vote in a presidential election since 1988. Three of the past four presidents have taken office after winning less than 50 percent of the vote. Attitudes are so hardened that the correlation of voting outcomes in states from one presidential election to the next is extraordinarily high. The country has been so closely divided for so long that wild and dramatic swings from Democrats to Republicans and back in midterm elections are the norm rather than the exception. Neither party seems to get more than five minutes to govern before a pitchfork-wielding rage mob shows up to toss them out of office at the very next election. Just as it seemed like one party was consolidating its grip on power, as when Republicans won their third straight presidential election in 1988, or when Democrats swept to power in back-to-back landslides in 2006 and 2008, or when Republicans captured Congress and the presidency in 2016, the bottom dropped out, and the seemingly doomed party staged an improbable comeback that looked much more predictable in hindsight. A thousand eulogies for the dead and dying Democratic and Republican parties have been proven, again and again, to be wrong. The dreams of consultants and strategists all end in the same nightmare of watching your recently vanquished opponents rise from the dead and smite you.
Today’s Republican Party, however, is doing its best to break this thirty-year-long stalemate in American politics—not by expanding its appeal and picking off pieces of the Democratic coalition, but by systematically repulsing and alienating America’s youngest voters. The way that the American political system so often fails to translate majority sentiment into majority governing coalitions has falsely convinced GOP elites that their popularity is growing, rather than shrinking, and it is causing the those who do understand the problem to engage in democracy-warping escalations to protect their ill-gotten power.
Others simply assume that the pendulum will eventually swing back with toward young folkspeople and that today’s DSA radicals will be tomorrow’s Not In My Backyard old people fighting to preserve single-family zoning and voting, reluctantly, for the people who promise to take less of their hard-earned money on tax day. Most analysts in the popular press are missing the significance of this trend by assuming that young voters have always skewed liberal, only to drift into curmudgeonly conservatism as they age. They’ll fumble around for some version of “If you’re not a liberal at twenty-five, you have no heart and if you’re not a conservative at thirty-five you have no brain” and think about that one family member who volunteered for George McGovern only to become an old person proudly drinking out of a MAGA mug every morning and plotting to leave his grandchildren a planet completely obliterated by global warming.
This is simply not true on many different levels. First of all, young people have not always voted for Democrats and have not always leaned left, let alone by the margins we see today. Ronald Reagan won the youngest voting demographic by 22 points in 1984, and in 1988, George H. W. Bush edged out Michael Dukakis with them by 6 points. In 1992, Bill Clinton did better with elderly voters than he did with the youngest. As recently as 2000, Republican George W. Bush tied Democrat Al Gore with eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, according to exit polls.[i] Young people in the polling era have never been especially conservative, in comparison to the rest of the population, but nor have they been as heavily left as most people think.
Something unprecedented started happening in 2002. In an unusually strong midterm election for the sitting president’s party, the GOP picked up seats in both the House and Senate. But according to exit polls, Democrats won eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds by 2 points. That was the last time Republicans came within single digits of winning the country’s youngest voters in the national House vote. Democrats won eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds by 12 points in 2004, 22 in 2006, 30 in 2008, 16 in 2010, 22 in 2012, 10 in 2014, 14 in 2016, and then by a mind-boggling 35 points in 2018. Several of these elections were Republican wave years, particularly 2010 and 2014—total disasters for Democrats amid a very real backlash against the Obama administration. Still, young voters barely budged.
2018 was a wave election year, of course, and Democrats should not necessarily expect to win younger voters by these margins every year. But there should have been two things that terrified Republican elites in President Trump’s first (and hopefully only) midterm election. The virtually unheard-of blowout with young people is one. The second is that the young voters who broke decisively away from the Republican Party starting in 2004 have become the thirty-to-forty-four age bracket, and their views are pretty much unchanged. Democrats won this group, a mix of millennials and younger Gen Xers, by 19 points. Through marriage and child-rearing and home-buying and all of the material trappings of early middle age that most people assume turn you into conservatives, these voters remained Democratic, with no tangible statistical evidence that the GOP was making inroads with them. So it’s not just today’s kids who are all left. It’s elder millennials and younger Gen Xers. The only thing holding Republican power together in 2019 is the fact that older voters turn out in substantially higher numbers than younger ones.
What was so shocking about the continued Democratic dominance of young Americans in 2016 and 2018 is that ordinarily you would expect new voters, at some point, to rebel against the party in power and embrace ideological alternatives to the status quo. Despite losing governorships across the country, bleeding out thousands of state legislative seats and then handing Congress and the presidency to Republicans at the conclusion of the Obama era, Democrats never lost young people, not even for a moment. In fact, if only people under the age of twenty-nine had voted in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have been elected by Reagan-Mondale margins in the Electoral College. And while this book will be published prior to the 2020 election and will steadfastly refuse to offer a prediction about what the ultimate outcome will be, you can be highly confident that the Democratic nominee will beat Donald Trump by at least 25 points with eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds. In fact, a 25-point deficit with that demograhpic would, in the upside-down universe of Trumpism where the president brags about 49 percent approval ratings on Twitter, be considered a kind of accomplishment.
The short story is that the Republican Party is well and completely screwed if they don’t start making inroads with young voters, people of color, and women—and soon. The longer story is an attempt to explain how, for almost two decades and counting, young people have been moving politically left and staying there, and to think about how this trend, if it continues (and it looks like it will), might blow apart the long stalemate in American politics and either force the GOP to the left or consign it to a generation as a distinct national minority party. Either of these outcomes, frankly, would be just fine, although watching the Republican Party come apart in fiery ruins like the Hindenburg would be extremely satisfying for everyone on the left. Starting in about 2024, the twenty-nine-year-old millennials who broke against George W. Bush will be nearing fifty.
Copyright © 2020 by David Faris. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
