They Turned the GOP Into the Tea Party

I’ll probably do a longer piece on GOP turnout tomorrow, but I just want to start a discussion on this:

Only 5 percent of eligible voters younger than 30 cast ballots on Super Tuesday, roughly splitting evenly among Romney, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), according to an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

So far, only about 600,000 voters younger than 30 have cast ballots in all the Republican primaries, said Peter Levine, ­CIRCLE’s director. That’s fewer than half the number who voted for then-candidate Obama prior to Super Tuesday in 2008, although it’s an imperfect comparison because more primaries in 2008 were before Super Tuesday.

But the difference is so large that it points to a big potential weakness, Levine said.

And don’t miss this:

White and gray.

That’s the clear pattern for turnout in the Republican presidential race over its first two months.

After Super Tuesday, exit polls have now been conducted in 14 states from all regions of the country. In all 14 of those states, white voters, and voters over 50, both comprised a significantly larger share of the electorate in this year’s GOP primary than they did in the 2008 general election. In many cases, the gap on each front has been enormous.

You will be flabbergasted by the numbers in that article. It’s like the Republican Party has been left on an ice floe to die.