Rafayel Yeranosyan - “Pahlevan” at AGBU Performing Art Center in Pasadena, CA, March 14 2025, (818) 265-0506 
The Armenian American Museum Young Leaders Council in Glendale, CA. December 13th - 15th at 7:00 PM. Call: (818) 926-8108 Trump's alienation of younger voters is a generational gamble for GOP
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
(CNN)The sharp turn against the Republican Party by young people in the 2018 election may be only the overture to an even greater political risk for the GOP in 2020.
Both historical voting patterns and underlying demographic trends suggest that the biggest difference in the electorate between this election and the next one is that relatively younger voters will cast a greater share of the votes in the presidential year -- perhaps a much larger share. Even with much higher than usual turnout among young voters this year, voters 45 and below are likely to increase their proportion of the total vote from just under three-in-ten this year to something closer to four-in-ten by 2020, historical trends suggest.
"They will certainly be a larger percent of voters than they were in 2018 given presidential versus midterm trends," says Yair Ghitza, the chief scientist at Catalist, a leading Democratic voter targeting and election modeling firm. "The question is to what extent the [higher] engagement we saw in 2018 will continue and be better than in 2016 and other presidential years."
A rising participation level could threaten Republicans at a moment when younger voters, who have consistently expressed preponderant opposition to President Donald Trump in polls, provided Democrats their largest margins in decades during last month's election.
"Voters under 45 moved decisively and overwhelmingly toward Democrats, and I don't know how you take it as anything other than a total rebuke of Trump and what's he done," says Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann, who has extensively studied younger voters.
Despite Democrats' emphatic gains among younger voters, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote, a book on the Millennial Generation, says the GOP shows no signs of grappling with the shift. "Even though the election, especially on the House side, was not good for Republicans there has not been an appetite for a course correction or a change in approach," she says. "So it would surprise me if there was a concerted effort to try win over more young voters between now and the 2020 election."
Methodological changes this year in the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, a consortium of media organizations that includes CNN, make it impossible to compare the share of the vote cast in 2018 by voters under 45 with that in earlier years. Census Bureau data on the electorate's composition isn't available yet.
But preliminary Catalist analysis of the 2018 results provides a consistent data source to assess the trends. Past numbers from Catalist are based on actual turnout tied to voter records while it generated this year's preliminary numbers by comparing their pre-election data on registration, early voting and planned turnout with actual results at the precinct or county level. The analysis found that both voters aged 18-29 (the younger half of the millennial Generation) and those aged 30-44 (the older millennials and younger part of Generation X) constituted a larger share of the vote this year than in 2014, the most recent mid-term election. Combined, those voters under 45 cast 29% of the votes last month, Catalist estimates, compared to 26% in 2014.
Several states with Democratic campaigns that particularly targeted young people saw bigger increases, according to previously unpublished Catalist data. In Arizona, the share of the vote cast by those under 45 spiked from 21% in 2014 to 29% this year; in Georgia, the numbers jumped from 29% to 36% ; Texas increased from 26% to 33%.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/04/politics/trumps-alienation-of-younger-voters-is-a-generational-gamble-for-gop/index.html
