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The Washington Post reports that gay marriage is gaining support amongst younger voters.
A growing number of Republicans are breaking with the party’s traditional stance to publicly state their support for same-sex marriage, a shift strategists say stems as much from demographics as from the renewed focus on economics and the “tea party” movement.
A solid majority of adults younger than 30 – about six in 10 – support the right of gay and lesbian couples to legally wed, according to a Washington Post poll in February.
But even many older Americans and self-identified social conservatives have changed their view on an issue that just six years ago galvanized voters in support of President George W. Bush’s reelection.
Click here to read more.
Doesn’t surprise me. The GOP is increasingly returning to its Goldwater roots and abandoning it’s Jerry Falwell Conservatism. The GOP and the country is moving on towards defending freedom and less government rather than imposing false morality on others. This is a great development!
Every poll for the last couple of years shows the same 30% of the Religious Right that rides the coat tails of the GOP so they can claim the entire Right is on their side. That strategy has collapsed. Conservatives are now saying that you have to know the difference between core conservative values like equality and freedom for all and your religious beliefs. If you live in the world that hates gays and lesbians and insist you’re upholding conservatives value, you’re lying about conservatives. Freedom is for everyone. Get used to it.
Who cares? Opposing Gay marriage is a winning issue right now. No one who peddles this garbage cares about the GOP winning, however.
cotton
check out this website it pretty much covers the goldwater angle and i for one hope goldwaterism catches on like wildfire….if it does i’ll vote GOP once again…
http://politheo.com/
to me, its as important culturally as being right-handed, left-handed or ambiguous
Nanotek:
It’s so important you’re equating it with your arms? Peculiar comparison.
jg bennett – Yes I would vote for a goldwater style republican in a heartbeat. If only the GOP would give me one to vote for. I suspect there will be more & more of them in the future though. Thank God.
Who cares? Opposing Gay marriage is a winning issue right now. No one who peddles this garbage cares about the GOP winning, however.
Now that’s the attitude we need to see more of! What the electorate wants is more cynical gay-bashing demagoguery! Who needs young voters!
For a while in the 1970s, the conservative mag National Review toyed with the idea of supporting gay rights. Their attitude was that if you put aside the gay rights issue, gay people have the same concerns as everyone else: The economy, foreign policy, etc. (Unlike, say, black people, who have their unique history of slavery to contend with.)
But then these conservatives made their bargain with the social conservatives, and any more talk of this was trashed.
As long as the GOP depended on social conservatives to be the foot soldiers of the GOTV drives, they had to bow to the social conservatives’ agenda.
But that seems to be changing. The Tea Party movement isn’t obsessed with gay marriage or even with abortion. Rather, it’s really focused on economic issues.
“But that seems to be changing. The Tea Party movement isn’t obsessed with gay marriage or even with abortion. Rather, it’s really focused on economic issues.?
Sinz54, What do you think animates the focus on economic issues now, given the noticeable silence during the Bush admin, which inherited a surplus and handed us a $9 trillion deficit, two unfunded wars, a $400 billion give away to pharm, adding $20 + trillion to our unfunded liabilities and then TARP in the final days of Bush II? That’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my brain around.
But that seems to be changing. The Tea Party movement isn’t obsessed with gay marriage or even with abortion. Rather, it’s really focused on economic issues.
But unfortunately when this translates into candidates — the actual individuals that we’d be voting for — they all turn out to be either the most virulent homophobes or the jelly-kneed uncommitted types. There is a huge gulf between “not alienating” LGBT voters and attracting them.
Given that younger voters also oppose “neoconservative” foreign policy, and show stronger support for “socialism” than older voters, do you think we should also abandon those parts of our platform?
Furthermore, since young voters also oppose abortion at higher rates than other voters, why does David continue to oppose that aspect of the GOP’s platform, which would appear to concur with younger voters?
There is no reason to think that social issues have hurt the GOP any more than any other issue. Who honestly attributes the 2006 and 2008 losses to over-emphasis on social policy? The former was about Iraq and Katrina; the latter about the economy. Social issues barely entered the fray at all.
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[...] course she said this because a majority of young voters favor marriage equality. Gallagher’s comments are spooky in that she echoes an [...]