The changing demographics will very soon completely marginalize the Republicans into a regional party, even fringier than they are now. They have lost young voters, are tied or losing with the middle age brackets, and only have one reliable age group in the over 60 voters.
We all know this and what does any of this have to do with abortion?
Jed gave us a diary today on the War on WomenHouse vote on abortion ban.
Basically (and much in the same way as Republicans are working so hard to re-brand themselves with minorities) Republicans are saying:
"we must play for the base" (evangelical in this case) "and hope that women and younger voters don't hear our hatred."
I was curious about how demographic trends are affected by these hyper-religious issues, so I plotted them to see what they look like. (I used
exit poll data from the NY Times for 2008 and before, and I added
NY Times exit poll data for 2012.) It appears that Republicans don't have a great chance with the younger population and as we all age, their electability looks even worse. The chart below shows the age demographic trends, as in percentage of electorate voted for Democrats in Presidential elections, and it certainly appears that Republicans are doomed as Democrats are poised to surpass Republicans in every voting group, including their key over 60 group not very far from now. While the trendline for this group does not look quite right to me for this group (for the statistic buffs, it must have a low R squared value - only 0.28 indicating that the extrapolation is not that reliable and that compares to 0.5 to 0.6 for the other age group trendlines) it still shows very clearly that in every other group the trends is away from the Republicans.
Young people don't have the religious & zealous view on abortion (or on marriage equality for that matter) that Republicans cling to as a way to get the evangelicals to turn out. In 2008 two-thirds of young voters (18-29) voted against Republicans and in 2012 it was 60% of that group that voted against Republicans (in spite of the fact that younger people were some of the hardest hit by this economic recovery). About one third of those young people feed into the 30-44 age group every four years and this is why Republicans can no longer win in either of these two age groups. The 45-59 age group has traditionally been reliably Republican, but that group is essentially tied since 1996 (average of all years has Dems winning by 48.4% to 48.2%), with the Dems winning in 2008 and the Republicans in 2012. This leaves only one group that is reliably Republican, the over 60 voters. There are two main problems with this group:
(1) they are dying off at a rate of about 2.5% every 4 years, which means the age group's votes for Republicans are diluted by people in the 45-59 group that is no longer reliably Republican,
and (probably due to item 1, but also because of the Republican war on senior citizens that are not millionaires)
(2) even within that group they are no longer commanding secure leads - in the 70s & 80s (except for Carter-Ford) this group voted for Republicans by 60-40 to 70-30 majorities; compare that to the last 7 elections where the best they could do in this group was 56-44 - yes Mitt Romney did great!
So please Republicans, keep ramming through anti-abortion bills! They are unpleasant and uncalled for, but they will take you down the same road where you are going with your
war on "scary brown fertile people."