Excerpt: Kristen Soltis Anderson's 'The Selfie Vote'
— -- Excerpted from THE SELFIE VOTE: Where Millennials are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep up) by Kristen Soltis Anderson, courtesy of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, Copyright © 2015 by Kristen Soltis Anderson.
From the Introduction:
It’s no secret that the GOP has had a hard time winning over the millennial generation—the newest voters in the electorate—and that this has made it increasingly hard for Republicans to win elections.
I am young and I am a Republican. I don’t view these things as in any way contradictory or unusual. During November of 2002, when I was 18 years old, I walked down to the Reitz Union on the campus of the University of Florida to cast my very first ballot, voting for Governor Jeb Bush to return for a second term as governor of my state. I had old friends from my high school debate days who, as Democrats, would engage me in good-natured political arguments, but I never felt that being conservative marked me as bizarre in any way. Sure, it was a little bit weird to be a young person deeply interested in politics, but it wasn’t necessarily weird to be a young person who was Republican.
At 20 years old, I loaded up my personal belongings into my beloved Ford Mustang and drove up I-95 to begin an adventure in Republican politics in Washington. When I came to work in Washington as a young pollster and public opinion researcher in early 2005, there was a palpable sense that Republicans were invincible. Shortly after the reelection of President Bush in 2004, Republicans were dominant and jubilant. They’d just secured the White House for four more years. They’d picked up a handful of seats in the U.S. Senate (while losing just one, a previously Republican-held seat in Illinois, to none other than a newcomer named Barack Obama) and they’d taken out then Senate minority leader Tom Daschle in the process. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican majority grew by a few seats.
That feeling of invincibility did not last long. Over the next few years Americans soured on the Republican Party, and by the time the 2008 election rolled around, the GOP was ushered out of the White House with resounding force. In the run-up to the 2008 election, anecdotally, I started to feel a shift in how my friends outside of politics were looking in at the parties. I started getting asked different versions of the question: How can you be Republican? You seem nice and normal! Friends who had previously thought I was an oddball for being so interested in politics now thought I was odd for being Republican. They were tuned in, fired up, and ready to go for Barack Obama, and couldn’t fathom why someone would choose to associate with the GOP.I’ve spent the last six years trying to crack the code on young voters. I’ve pored over countless public opinion surveys, conducted focus groups all over the country, and taken a deep dive into all of the data about where my generation stands and what we believe.What I have found should terrify Republicans.
Not all of my fellow partisans share my fears. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last few years I’ve been told that the GOP doesn’t need to worry about all these young people voting for Democrats. After all, they say, people become more conservative as they get older, throwing around a version of the line “If you’re young and conservative, you have no heart, and if you’re old and liberal, you have no brain,” usually falsely attributed to Winston Churchill. They’re eager to make the case that all is well. Surely, these crazy kids with their sushi and their startups and their selfies will one day grow up, move out of Mom and Dad’s basement, get married, get a real job, start paying taxes, and, voilà, they’ll become Republicans!
Not quite.
Republicans shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for my generation to grow up and age into conservatism on their own.
There are three reasons why Republicans need to get past the idea that losing millennial voters is no big deal.
The first is that this moment is not normal. In the past, while Democrats have often done very slightly better with young voters, we have not seen the sort of enormous, sustained generational political divide that we are seeing today. Even as recently as fifteen years ago, young voters behaved generally like their grandparents at the polls. Today that is unfathomable.
The second reason why Republicans need to pay attention to winning young voters today is that we can’t count on them naturally becoming Republican tomorrow. Across a whole host of cultural factors, today we are seeing a decline in the sorts of behaviors that might have lent Republicans a more natural advantage with millennials as they age.
When I conduct a survey of voters, I often ask a series of demographic questions in order to segment and analyze the results. The most common demographic items that pollsters like me look for include age, race, marital status, religion, income, education level, and type of location where one lives. These factors alone can tell you a lot about how someone might vote. Republicans, for instance, do well among married voters; Democrats do well among voters who aren’t married. Republicans do well among voters who go to church every week, but lose voters who go to church less often. Republicans do well with voters who live in more spread-out or rural areas, while Democrats do well in denser areas and city centers.
So what trends are we seeing among millennials? They’re flocking to denser areas, they’re less likely to go to church regularly, and they’re less likely to get married, just to name a few. Republicans are potentially on the losing side of a whole host of social trends, and need to be certain they can reach voters who don’t have the normal “Republican” cultural and demographic indicators. Many of these voters are millennials.
But the final reason why Republicans need to actively seek to understand young people and to work hard for their support is because many Republicans fundamentally misunderstand millennial values and where the opportunities—and challenges—exist. They often take too simplistic a view of what young people want.
Young Americans are more diverse and complicated than most—including and especially the Republican Party—give them credit for. When I hear Republicans talk about winning over young voters—which, sadly isn’t often—it often focuses on a need to be more present in social media, to evolve on “social issues” like same-sex marriage, and to emphasize individual liberty and fiscal conservatism. Fine, but this idea is too narrow, too simple, and far too incomplete.
Republicans haven’t always been the party of the old or the party of the past. There hasn’t always been a stark divide between young voters and their grandparents. And the cultural and technological trends that make up millennial life in America today suggest that if Republicans don’t gain an understanding of what values are driving this generation, they are at serious risk of being left behind.
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Like taking a selfie, eating a spicy tuna roll hardly seems like a profound act of political expression. Since the 1960s, when the Japanese cuisine hopped the Pacific and began to permeate American restaurants and grocery stores, the sushi industry in the U.S. has grown enormously. In 2001, when the new SuperTarget opened near my childhood home in Orlando with its own sushi counter, it seemed extraordinary if not bizarre that we’d be able to pick up salmon nigiri at the same time we were picking up paper towels or batteries. Yet, a decade and a half later, I can walk into just about any suburban grocery store and find a California roll as easily as I can find milk or eggs.I love sushi. The concept of raw fish does not bother me in the least. The same cannot be said of my parents. Mom is fine with California rolls, but those don’t actually involve raw fish. Dad was amused when the cafeteria at his workplace began bringing in a sushi chef on Mondays about a year ago, but he and his engineer friends do not partake. (Asked directly, he told me “I have yet to see any sushi at my old geezer table in the cafeteria.” His characterization, not mine.)
It turns out that I am not particularly alone as a younger sushi lover, nor are my parents so unusual for their age in their apprehensive approach to the cuisine. Younger people are much more likely to say they are fine with trying sushi than are those from older generations. There’s a reason why Google, on a quest to recruit and retain the best and the brightest young workers, has offered employees fresh sushi and an incredible multitude of culinary options in their cafeterias: young people tend to have adventurous palates and an appetite for new experiences. While nearly six out of ten adults under age 30 say they’d be open to trying sushi, only four out of ten from their parents’ generation—those aged 46 to 65—said the same. Seniors are even less excited about giving sushi a whirl: fewer than three out of ten senior citizens say they’d be willing to give sushi a try.
Age, it turns out, is not the only characteristic that is in some way correlated with openness to sushi. The researchers behind the survey also sliced their data on comfort with sushi by how their participants identified politically. Sure enough, while a majority of Democrats said they’d eat sushi, 64 percent of Republicans said they would not.
So it comes as no surprise then that when Dave Gilson, an editor at Mother Jones magazine, lined up the data on attitudes about sushi with data from the Pew Research Center on attitudes about same-sex marriage, he found that “age-based unwillingness to put delicious uncooked fish in your mouth correlates nearly perfectly with existing data about who disapproves of marriage equality.”Correlation is not causation. Whether one does or doesn’t like spicy tuna is not necessarily a cause (or effect) of one’s attitude toward politics or same-sex marriage. Similarly, it’s unlikely that a single voter has walked into a voting booth in America and selected a candidate based on their preference for (or aversion to) a particular food.
But our political attitudes are rooted somewhere, and often the same things that drive our politics drive our attitudes in other areas of our lives. Our consumer and lifestyle choices may seem at first blush to have nothing to do with our politics. Whether we eat sushi or take selfies seems totally separate from how we vote. Yet all three of those elements—our shopping, our lifestyles, and our political views—influence, and are influenced by, how we see the world.
For instance, research has found a relationship between political conservatism and feelings of “contamination disgust”—being repulsed by having contact with the toilet seat in a public restroom or drinking a soda someone else has already started drinking. Conservatives, it is said, place greater value on things like purity and tradition than their liberal counterparts, and this doesn’t just show up at the voting booth. It shows up in how you feel about watching someone double-dip a chip.
Our political choices do not exist in a vacuum. Google brought in sushi to adapt to the preferences of the younger generation, which was clamoring for something different and expected lots of choice. We also expect change and choice from our political leadership. The line between the consumer and the voter is increasingly blurred, and the same values that lead to us making certain consumer or lifestyle choices are not so different from those values that drive our political views as well.Like the selfie, sushi did not begin as mainstream in America. And, like the selfie, the rise of sushi in America does not necessarily have one big lesson to teach us about our politics. More selfies may mean we as a nation are becoming more individualistic. More sushi may mean we are more open to trying new things. Watching the trends that start off more popular with the new generation and ultimately spread upward and outward can give us small clues about where our country is headed.But for each of these relatively minor lifestyle or consumer choices people make, there are even bigger ones at hand—the decision to own a home, to go to church, to buy a car, to join a union, to invest in stocks, to get married—that speak volumes about who we are and what we stand for.
Following all of these trends, from the silly to the serious, can actually tell us a lot about where our nation’s politics are truly heading.