I don’t know if Frank Luntz has fully emerged from his post-2012 despondency but he showed up in Cleveland and found time to chat with the South Carolina delegation. To tell you the truth, he still sounds pretty despondent to me.
“We have lost. It’s not like we are losing, we have lost that generation. And I don’t care if you are a Democrat, Republican, independent, none of the above. The fact that 58 percent [of millennials] say socialism is the better form of economics, that is the damage of academia,” he said at a breakfast event here.
“The No. 1 priority to me is what happens at universities. And yes, Capitol Hill matters, yes politics matter, but a whole generation is being taught by professors who voted for Bernie Sanders. That’s a problem that begs for a solution.”
Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate, identifies as a democratic socialist.
As Luntz spoke, one delegate muttered under his breath, “We are screwed.”
What’s odd is that he’s still so stuck on how our children are being educated rather than on how his party is diverging from millennials on a much broader set of issues than just capitalism versus socialism.
Since I have two millennial stepsons, I do have the opportunity to interact with this generation, and they reject the Republican Party primarily because of the perception that they’re religious prudes and scolds who are opposed to pluralism.
Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.– GOP Autopsy
It’s not like the Republican National Committee’s 2012 post-mortem autopsy report was wrong when it stated that Republicans could not get millennials to listen to their economic message unless they became more accepting of the LGBT community and less overtly hostile to Latinos.
Yet, the Republicans have responded by nominating Donald Trump, a birther who beat out more than a dozen better credentialed candidates by calling Mexicans ‘rapists’ and promising to deport them en masse while forcing the Mexican government to pay for a wall on the border to keep them out.
The Republicans have nominated a vice-president who is most famous for signing a law in his home state of Indiana that would allow people to discriminate against the LGBT community without fear of legal consequence. In fact, Republicans have passed similar laws in several states and are currently obsessing on the possibility that transexual people might be using the “wrong” bathroom.
To say that millennials are focused on other problems than Mexican immigration, gay wedding cakes and transexuals’ potty preferences would be a massive understatement.
If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.– GOP Autopsy
They’re focused on the fact that college has turned into a debtor’s prison and housing is completely unaffordable on today’s entry level wages and salaries. That’s where the appeal of socialism comes into play.
As for capitalism, it may still be a popular word but bailing out the practitioners of capitalism on Wall Street was no more popular on the Tea Party side of the divide than on the Occupy side. It didn’t take college professors to convince people that a bunch of greedheads had engaged in enough fraud to tank the global economy, costing them their jobs, and often their houses.
Other than skirting their responsibility for enabling the stock market crash of 2007-8, what have Republicans done to help clean up the mess or ensure that we don’t have a repeat?
Frank Luntz doesn’t ask these questions, perhaps because he doesn’t want to face the answers.
Instead, he cracks jokes.
“Bernie Sanders is so old, it takes him an hour and a half to watch “60 Minutes.” … He is so old, the only time he doesn’t have to pee is when he’s peeing,” Luntz quipped.
On Clinton: “Clinton chose to live in Chappaqua, New York. Did you know that Chappaqua is Indian for separate bedrooms?”
“I know that I’ve got reporters in here — I just want to say to reporters that I do actually have a ‘Run Hillary Run’ bumper sticker on my car,” he said. “I just put it on my front bumper.”
Hardy, har, har, am I right?
about that!
Nope, I just lied.
The GOP real problem, they refuse to listen to voters.
Okay, the bumper sticker made me chuckle. Mostly because of COURSE he would do that.
Jesus
!!!
The man was black. That was his first clue.
And the marijuana crack is the tell. Surprisingly none of the 2nd Amendment heroes pulled a gun and shot him.
And yes, Capitol Hill matters, yes politics matter, but a whole generation is being taught by professors who voted for Bernie Sanders. That’s a problem that begs for a solution.”
Do we have any proof of this? Since the Clinton/Sanders divide was on age. Was there any profession where the older age groups broke for Sanders?
Proof? This is a party that has rejected science and facts for years and you ask for proof. The proof is that the party that has steadfastly ignored reality since 1980 has nominated a reality show celebrity that tells more lies than fact-checkers can check and makes their last Presidential candidate look like a piker…
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/08/29/mitt-romney-tells-533-lies-in-30-weeks-steve-ben
en-documents-them/
Chances are if the GOP says it – it is a fabrication. They just can’t help themselves anymore.
Frank Luntz’s jibes at Bernie Sanders age and the Hillary Clinton bumper sticker just go to show that Donald Trump is just the usual, everyday Republican fare—big, brassy and crude.
Luntz is among the very worst Americans. He’s a guy who said that his life was transformed after reading Orwell’s novel 1984. While he’s unwilling to admit it directly, his career has revealed that his single-minded response to the novel was “hey, that’s a great idea! I would love to benefit from administering the power of propaganda on behalf of a totalitarian state!”
So, Frank’s becoming panicky in his disappointment that the opportunity to gain sufficient political support for totalitarianism in the U.S. is drifting away. Well, fuck him for having worked to make it a closer call than it might have been without his psychological manipulations of Americans.
Luntz’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show last week was a travesty. Direct factual lies were told, shamelessly, aggressively, in direct challenge to Maher’s factual statements.
among Frank’s crowd, right?
And yet despite a GOP platform that Attila the Hun would have approved, Trump is going to wind up with somewhere around 45% of the vote, because “Republicans fall in line,” as the saying goes, and because they’ve been marinated in 25 years of Hillary Hatred.
It would be interesting to scroll back a few months and read all the confident predictions that a Trump nomination would split the GOP. I guess those of us who though that was a real possibility were deluded enough to think that there were a lot of Republicans who actually cared about the survival of democratic governance in the United States.
Trump is consistently failing to gain over 40% in national polls. While he may get to 45% in November, that appears to be in substantial doubt.
should be wholly sufficient cause for repudiation of the GOP by anyone with a functioning conscience — a point I’ve made here before.
That so many GOPers nevertheless HAVEN’T renounced that party affiliation makes “deluded” just the right word choice for any notion
The destruction only happens after Trump loses, which is not a guarantee.
Once Trump loses, the Republican party should be dead for a couple of national election cycles, which is when political parties tend to crack up.
You already have Republicans split among “Republicans”, “Tea Party” whatevers, “Never Trump”, and the self-identified independents who have just enough self-consciousness to know that their brand is toxic outside of their own bubble.
If and when Trump loses, I’d expect the Republican party to have a lot of trouble rebounding, unlike 2008 and 2012.
In the GOP is between the voters and the money. And it is yawning wide open.
A significant portion of those under 44 are in the process of rejecting both parties. From the Yougov poll, which gives good cross-tab.
Honest and Trustworthy
All
Clinton: 25-60 no
Trump: 28-55 no
Under 30
Clinton: 32-50 no
Trump 16-68 no
Favorable
Under 30
Clinton: 51-42
Trump: 16-79
Trial Heat,
Under 30
Clinton 49, Trump 17, Johnson 7, Stein 9, Someone else 5, Undecided 9
44-30
Clinton 42, Trump 27, Johnson 10, Stein 6, Someone else 4, Undecided 9
So:
under 45 about 1/3 have not decided or are voting third party. My bet it doesn’t last, Clinton gets most of that vote (see Trump’s favorables under 30) and she wins by 10 or more.
BUT there is very real noise here. Nobody trusts these candidates, and they don’t like them.
Both parties are in real trouble.
Clinton 49, Trump 17, Johnson 7, Stein 9, Someone else 5, Undecided 9
It’s hard for me to look at the results of the poll you share here and conclude that Hillary is doing poorly with younger voters. Her favorables with voters under 30 are significantly higher than her favorables with older voters.
And we can be confident that Hillary and her campaign will not do as Trump is doing to continually alienate young voters by his behaviors and statements on the trail. We can also reasonably predict that Bernie’s campaigning will further solidify these voters’ support for Clinton.
the point was 30% support neither party, though Clinton’s numbers are behind Obama’s among the young, and only 18% are enthusiastic about her.
Bernie runs. Trump and Hillary prefer to take a scooter.
“They’re focused on the fact that college has turned into a debtor’s prison and housing is completely unaffordable on today’s entry level wages and salaries. That’s where the appeal of socialism comes into play.”
Professors who all voted for Bernie Sanders, my ass.
Why deep-six a fifty year old sales pitch that has sold so well just because it doesn’t fit the facts? They never let that bother them in the past. If they changed now, they wouldn’t be conservatives.
The bumper sticker thing is part and parcel of batshit crazy right wingers. They have no sense of humor. Every piece of attempted humor is dependent upon someone else getting hurt. It is so blatant that it can be used to identify BCRW even when they are still under their rocks. Klan, Birchers, Posse, Identity, Aryans. All the same sick attempts at humor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBq_feHYQ4
Yeah, it’s because millennials recognize the Republican Party for exactly what it is: A bunch of angry, bitter old white men who think it’s funny to make jokes about smashing their Buicks into women they don’t like.
… bunch of angry, bitter old white people and a few POC like Dr. Ben that got theirs and therefore, believe that god/GOP is on their side …
My sense that Luntz is focused on university professors because what he really means is the millennial generation of the the 20% potential professional class of workers and local leaders.
Millennials vary in outlook geographically and by how much they are still within the orbits of their parents. There are a huge contingent within the megagchurch religious school and Roman Catholic parochial school outlooks that are different than their parents but as likely to become Sanders socialists as their parents were to be hippies.
In the 1960s, no one saw that the YAFers were going to be the political force of their generation; the media focus was elsewhere.
Glad that Luntz is depsondent and contagious, however.
Fortuna has made sure that I am not following this week closely. Lighting struck a tree 60 feet from our house (the tree is still standing upright) and took out our router. New one takes 10 days. So lighter than usual from me for the next week.
And libraries are still your friend.
“Hardy, har, har, am I right?”
Now where is Lippy the Lion?
Frank Luntz will be in the second group that is up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Depends on how long that wall is. If it’s Trump’s Mexican wall, he’ll definitely make it to the first group.
That is the best news I have heard this month.
Should be up to 75% for the generation following the millenials.
I’ve never heard numbers that good. The polls I’ve seen have 30-40% preferring socialism and a similar or somewhat larger group supporting capitalism. The millennials are far more sympathetic to socialism than any other generation but they aren’t that supportive, at least not yet. Luntz is being a little “alarmist” (from their point of view) to get noticed, I think.
Yeah, I’m not so sure about that number, but the real number is probably higher than most non-mills would think.
But it shouldn’t be surprising. Of course they’ll have a positive impression of alternative that looks potentially better than the one currently screwing them over. Oh, and is screwing over their planet as well.
I cannot imagine the Rs having a bump post convention. And when Luntz is despondent, the truth is going to come out – the Trump illusion is going to be a huge load to carry this fall.
manage to buck that standard trend (i.e., post-convention polling bump).
Looking good so far! They sure are working hard to accomplish that difficult feat, anyway.
5