It's wild how the GOP has like a good half dozen guys under the age of 50 ready to step up and become the next king of racism at any moment, but the Democrats, the party that relies on the youth vote, won't even look at you until you've had your AARP card for a decade.
a big thing that stays in my mind is that the dem party has plenty of younger politicians who have more or less the exact same politics as leadership, and - with exception of the NY dem machine - the leadership has never had any interest in building them up and frequently actively hate them.
DeSantis - 45
Vance - 39
Hawley - 43
Mullin - 45
Cotton - 45
Boebert - 36
Crenshaw - 38
These motherfuckers are going to be around for the next 30 goddamn years. That's a hell of a way to ensure continuity of culture.
And you can argue that Dems are, on average, only a year or two older, but the GOP is really really good at getting their next generation(s) of leadership out there and figuring out which of them has what it takes if they need them to step up.
You get a couple of public burn outs but that GOOD.
Observation I’ve seen in the past: young people have historically been much more liberal and one of the things that falls out of that is that Dems take their votes for granted while the GOP works very hard to recruit any rightwing young people they can.
One consequence is that the GOP and the various rotating set of rightwing orgs that support them are paradoxically much more effective at elevating people they think will appeal to young voters.
The alt-right was a youth movement the GOP has successfully captured. If they can break the under 40 vote along gender lines (like they seem to be doing) I think elections are going to get real hairy real fast.
DeSantis already showed he's inept. Vance and Hawley are the GOP equivalent of tryhards, Cotton is a charmless sociopath and Boebert might not even get reelected.
A lot of people underestimate how good Trump is at what he does.
Trump is a singular force in getting people who would normally sit out to go to the polls. But he only needs to do that one more time and then they have a real clear plan on how to install these people for basically forever.
Al Gore wasn't exactly a party machine but still got to the Whitehouse...
