Here’s a fact I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere: Ron Paul has come in first among voters under the age of 30 in all three Republican nominating contests this cycle. He won Iowa with 48%, New Hampshire with 46%, and South Carolina with 31%. In 2008, in contrast, he came in third among under 30s in Iowa and New Hampshire, and a weak fifth in South Carolina.
What’s going on here?
Well, mostly he’s just doing better with everybody. Paul’s numbers have always been highest among young voters, and they’ve generally been rising among under-30s more or less in proportion with how they’ve risen in the electorate as a whole.
But even so, the sheer magnitude of Paul’s youth support has got to be a little worrying for the party. Assuming that he’s not going to wind up the nominee — and everybody in the Republican establishment is making that assumption — that’s a lot of young people to bring back into the fold in November. And with Obama putting up huge numbers among under-30s in national polling on the general election, the GOP is going to need every young voter (and campaign worker) it can get.
The most obvious cause for panic in the Ron Paul youth polling, of course, would be a possible third-party run. But while Paul hasn’t unequivocally repudiated that idea, most observers think it’s not going to happen. (Here’s one really big reason why not.) Even with him on the sidelines in the fall, though, some of his young supporters may hesitate to pull the lever for Romney or Gingrich.
And there’s another reason for concern too. In Iowa and New Hampshire, youth support for Paul rose at about the same rate as his share of the overall vote — in Iowa, for instance, he got 2.1 times the votes in 2012 as in 2008, while his youth support was 2.3 times higher this time than last. In South Carolina, though, he tripled his support overall while quadrupling it among the young. If this trend continues and we see an accelerating youth rejection of establishment candidates, that could mean bigger headaches in the general.
Paul took 3% of the Florida vote in 2008, winning 5% of the youth vote. He’s polling at 9% there now, which is pretty much in line with his cycle-to-cycle improvement in the first three states, so assuming he winds up with about that total, we’d expect him to get something like 15% of young voters — and that’s with him largely ignoring the state.
If his Florida youth numbers are a lot higher than fifteen percent we could be seeing the start of something interesting.
January 31 Update | Exit polling has Ron Paul at 9% overall and at 26% among youth voters. That’s a tripling of his 2008 numbers for the whole electorate, and a quintupling of his numbers among youth. At this point I think it’s fair to say that the GOP has a Ron Paul problem with young voters.
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January 22, 2012 at 11:51 pm
James Stanhope (@ManchurianDevil)
There’s an additional reason why Ron Paul’s youth-vote surge unnerves Republicans, and that is the fact that white millenial Americans no longer have the strong party attachment that the same age group had, say, 50 years ago. If Ron Paul did run as a third-party candidate in 2012, he would certainly draw the millenials’ vote away from the GOP nominee on the basis of his consistent anti-neocon credentials alone. The GOP should worry.
January 24, 2012 at 2:19 am
Tony
The Republican Party’s militarism is a relic of World War II and the Cold War. Prior to the nomination of Wendell Willkie (1940), Paulite views on foreign policy were common on the Right.
Robert Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, William McKinley, and even Lincoln himself with the ‘spot’ resolutions, played dove to the Populist hawk. Places switched in the 1940s and 1950s as America’s enemies shifted from being European monarchical empires, native tribes and fascist aggressors to worldwide communism.
After the end of the Cold War, it looked for a time as if things might revert to form. Republicans criticized Bill Clinton’s foreign interventions as ‘nation building’ and George Bush promised a ‘humble’ foreign policy. But history was averted again by 9/11. It will be interesting if it attempts, once more, to reassert itself.
February 11, 2012 at 10:11 am
Sandy
If the author considers himself a “male feminist” he should remember that Ron Paul and the movement behind him is the most dangerous thing possible for organized feminism. Social conservatism has fed organized feminism for more than a century, almost like it’s been the other side of an elitist pro-collectivist coin. 100 years ago, evangelist males pushed to give women the vote in the US because they couldn’t pass the religious laws they wanted without the votes of the Christian Women Temperance Union. It was the liberal men who feared giving women the vote. Since then, most feminist memes were and are based on opposition to or adherence to social conservative memes (feminists agree with religious zealots about condemning older men dating much younger women) but feminists are always saying the social conservatives are relevant as frenemies.
Republican libertarians like Ron Paul will just flat out say that there’s no such thing as women’s “rights” anymore than men’s “rights” and entitlements. Unlike the socialist conservatives, they would go with an evolutionary psychologist’s view of the world which is laissez faire in terms of government intervention in people’s social lives. Ron Paul types won’t be putting any young women on pedestals. Compared to the new world of individual liberties, feminists would wish they had W back with his :compassionate conservatism”, where the GOP of 2001-2009 almost totally embraced victim feminism except for the idea that a woman in need of an abortion is a victim in need of government help.
Ron Paul voted against VAWA in 2005 (including it’s attempted criminalization of the mail order bride industry) as the only Republican except for Tom Tancredo. He, almost alone, noticed that the law wasn’t at least called the Violence Against People Act (it would not have passed if it was so named because laws already exist against violence). He doesn’t believe a government can pass a law making it illegal for an employer to sleep with his secretary or a professor to sleep with adult students. He’d never pass a law making men criminals for buying sex either.
So, yes, it’s fantastic that the new generation loves Ron Paul.
Just remember that the “regulate male behavior” victim style feminism will have to disappear as Ron Paul’s message gains strength. Those who don’t want that to disappear, will pray for Santorum to win the nomination so the currently organized feminists will have a punching bag to beat the hell out of and gain funds to fight.