Generation Zzzz: How the GOP can wake up millennial voters

If the GOP were a medical patient, it would currently be strapped to a table, moaning feebly as it tried not to flatline for good.

Beep…beep…beep…

{mosads}At first glance, it appears that there are some signs for hope. After all, millennials are a big chunk of the voting bloc and new polls show that they are more conservative than past generations. Good news for the GOP, right?

Wrong.

This will be a tough pill for the patient to swallow, but those millennials aren’t Republicans … they’re libertarians.

Uh oh.

If the millennials all turned out to vote, they would be the country’s largest voting bloc. The stodgy GOP is fond of labeling all young people as slackers who think the world owes them a favor. Yet the GOP’s insistence on these labels discounts millennials as though they wouldn’t even know how to vote if their lives depended on it.

While it is true that millennials have not been the most committed voters, it is also true that they’re going to mature. This generation is going to be in charge of the country one day, so knowing what they want is critical to understanding the political climate. All campaigning hinges on a comprehensive knowledge of which incentives galvanize specific voters to action.

No one has accused the GOP of having any sense, but if it did, the party would be on its hands and knees groveling for the millennials to take it more seriously.

Voting must come down to the results that each voter wants for the country. Millennials, no matter how typecast by your cranky uncle who spends his days forwarding political emails to everyone because he still hasn’t figured out Facebook, have simple needs.

They want freedom. Freedom in the bedroom, freedom to have more opportunities (which largely translates to more money in their wallets), freedom to speak their minds, freedom to affordable education…the list goes on and on. 68 percent of millennials support gay marriage; 56 percent think abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 69 percent support marijuana legalization.

None of this sounds unreasonable in the slightest, and yet, to hear the GOP tell it, you’d think that these simple requests for freedom were from a list of demands being made by someone during a hostage negotiation. For a group that talks incessantly about liberty, the Republicans haven’t always been the best at promoting it — especially when it comes to social issues.

62 percent of millennials identify as liberal on social issues but are considerably more conservative when it comes to fiscal issues. The GOP needs these young voters. They need every single person they can get who has libertarian leanings. And it’s not impossible, although it might require a few people to swallow their pride. The only way to go about it is to undo their top buttons, loosen up a little bit, and find a way to embrace some of the overlap between the two parties. If the Republican Party could even seem a little more libertarian, they would have built-in support from people who already want liberty.

Politics is always a fight, but it doesn’t always have to be a battle. And even when it turns into a battle, the ability to pick and choose can make the difference between who gets mocked and who gets into the Oval Office.

By showing that it can use the best ideas of libertarianism in its own political philosophies, the Republican Party has a chance at resuscitating itself. It needs to pick battles that it has a shot at winning. Worrying about posturing and semantics and tradition is fine, I guess, but it’s not going to get the GOP the results it wants because it’s not at all fetching to these young voters.

If the GOP refuses to bend in order to capture some of the libertarian-leaning youth vote, it’s likely it will break. There is no trauma specialist in the country who’s going to be able to bring the GOP back to life.

But for now there is still a chance for the GOP to head back towards the light. Sure, it might be the glow of the latest Apple product, but the next president is going to be whoever locks in that iVote.