Is Trump Driving Young Republicans Out of the Party?

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Roy Moore’s stunning defeat in the Alabama special Senate election last night was a temporary setback for the forces of Trumpism that have gripped the Republican Party.

It has been clear in recent weeks that not everyone is thrilled by the direction of the Republican Party in the Trump era. Just this week, Joyce Simmons, the Nebraska Republican National Committeewoman, stepped away from her role with the party in response to its support for Mr. Moore. Depressed turnout in reliably Republican areas of Alabama on Tuesday suggest Ms. Simmons was not alone in taking a stand and saying “enough.”

Certainly, most Republicans are quite fond of President Trump and the direction he has taken the party. Yet in the wake of the Moore defeat — a concrete sign that Trumpism alone may not be able to sustain the party — dismayed Republicans across the country are left to decide: stay and fight, or simply flee?

“This fever will someday break,” Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona said in October, “and we can rebuild our party once more.” He decided to neither fight (and seek re-election) nor flee his party.

I often hear that sentiment — that what we are experiencing is just a blip — along with the belief that eventually a new generation of Republican leaders will rise up to save the party and the country.

Republicans skeptical of a “Trumpified” party should not be so sure. There is no guarantee that young Republicans will produce the green shoots to rebuild the party. Young voters in particular are burning off from both parties — especially the Republican Party — and becoming independents, and the remaining partisans are a more highly concentrated hard-line group.

Young Republicans who remain have largely embraced Trump-style Republicanism — but they also look increasingly unlike their nonpartisan peers.

The Republican Party’s struggles with young voters have existed for the past decade. After running nearly even with young voters in the 2000 election and losing them by a relatively modest margin in the 2004 election, Republicans have since then earned pitifully low shares of the youth vote.

Many once-Republican young people left the party, and many young people who might have considered themselves Republicans in the past are simply electing to stay independent. In the most recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll of Americans under 30, only 22 percent identified as Republican. The largest affiliation category was independent, at 39 percent. Research by NBC has confirmed that young voters increasingly see no need to identify with either party and are unsure if either one — but again, especially the Republican Party — cares about them. Only 6 percent of millennials in the NBC study said that they strongly approved of the job President Trump is doing (and 46 percent strongly disapproved).

In the Trump era, young voters may be walking away from the parties themselves, but they are voting quite like Democrats. (The Virginia governor’s race is an excellent example.)

Many Republicans are not terribly concerned about this issue. They point to strong support for Mr. Trump among young Republicans to suggest that all is well, ignoring that the remaining young Republicans are light-years away from their peers these days in terms of political attitudes.

It is true that young Republicans who have stayed in the party are mostly in favor of the president: The Harvard poll found that 66 percent of them approved of the job Mr. Trump was doing. That’s lower than the president’s approval among Republicans over all, but it’s still a significant majority.

But a deeper dive into the Harvard poll revealed three areas of disagreement between those who approve and disapprove of Mr. Trump as well as young independents who disapprove of Mr. Trump but nonetheless say they would prefer a Republican Congress.

The areas of biggest disagreement are climate change, immigration and refugees. Less than 33 percent of young Republicans who approve of Mr. Trump say they view climate change as a serious threat, but among young Republicans who disapprove of the president, that rises to over 60 percent. While over 70 percent of Trump-approving young Republicans believe undocumented immigrants and refugees are a threat to America, 60 percent of Republican Trump disapprovers say the opposite.

If the party continues to bleed younger voters, I believe these policy issues — climate change and immigration will be the drivers. In that case, the party’s turn to Trumpism will have won out among the young who still call themselves Republicans, but at the expense of scaring off many young voters who might have called themselves Republicans in another time. The results from the Alabama Senate race offer a glimpse of this future: In the counties of the University of Alabama and Auburn, support for the Republican, Mr. Moore, plummeted, swinging dramatically away from the margins that Mr. Trump won by in 2016 and toward double-digit wins for the Democrat, Doug Jones.

Not all young right-of-center voters have chosen to flee. There are places where young Republicans who wish to pull their party back from the precipice are staying and are putting up a fight. Take Alabama, where the state’s Young Republican Federation, along with the Birmingham Young Republicans, broke with their elders and pulled their support for Mr. Moore. (Some local young Republican groups did stand by Mr. Moore.)

The movement to expand the party’s appeal has struggled beyond the South. In California, leadership of the state College Republicans federation was contested by a candidate favoring “inclusion” and another who is an ally of the campus provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The ally of Mr. Yiannopoulos won.

The fever that Senator Flake mentioned is about anger and frustration at changes that are taking place in our society that are unlikely to abate. Those who are anxious about the technological, cultural and demographic changes sweeping the globe and America — including millennials — will grow only more anxious as those trends continue; they will turn to leaders like Mr. Trump and Mr. Moore, who claim they can reverse, or at least freeze, these changes.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the young people more comfortable with those changes — with new industries, new lifestyles and a more diverse America — and who might have played a role in shepherding the party along to apply principles of limited government and personal responsibility in this new context are walking away. The young people who remain are largely those who share the anxieties of their parents and grandparents and push back against the tides that most millennials have embraced.

For Republicans who are dismayed at the direction of the party, counting on a new generation to ride to the rescue may be overly optimistic. In a time of crisis for the party, young people have a choice to fight or to flee. Time is of the essence for today’s Republican leaders to give their more uncertain young supporters something to fight for.