“How
do you make abortion funny?” That was a key question mulled at a major
conservative gathering Friday on how to make social conservatism
appealing to young people, after an election where Republicans got
trounced in the battle for millennial voters (who are are moving even
further and further away from the Christian-right on marriage and other
issues).
Abortion has to be made funny, the thinking goes, because
funny sells on social media, and that’s where one goes to court young
people. “You can engage with sarcasm, it’s hard with the abortion issue,
but you have to,” said Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins at a
breakout panel at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in
Washington today on how to win millennial voters. “Unfortunately we have
to, because this is the generation that we’ve been dealt.”
As the
Republican Party tries to remake itself after the 2012 election to
better appeal to young people and minorities, there’s been a movement to
jettison issues social conservatives hold dear, especially support for
“traditional marriage.” But the activists at Ralph Reed’s confab said
absolutely not. “You’ve got to be pro-life, you’ve got be pro-marriage,
or else you’re not going to get our money,” Hawkins said firmly.
How, then, do you win over young voters when as many as
70 percent support marriage equality? The answers offered feel a bit like jamming a square peg in a round hole.
The
young activists on the panel pointed to data from a poll conducted by
the College Republican National Committee for the recent report it
issued on how the GOP can win millennials. The poll, which showed that
while young people support marriage equality (the GOP should not
“crusade against same-sex marriage,” is
one of
the recommendations), the issue is not young people’s top priority.
That finding, said Chris Malagasi, the president of the Young
Conservatives Coalition, shows that politicians can still appeal to
young people while opposing gay marriage, as long as they talk about the
issue in a smart way.
That
smart way includes snark, and it includes social media. In 2012,
Malagasi said, Republicans did OK on the TV ad war, but never invested
in digital, giving Obama a 3-1 advantage on Facebook likes, a 10-1
advantage on YouTube follows, and a 20-1 advantage on Twitter followers.
“This is a battlefield that we’re losing on,” he said. He also lamented
that none of the party’s official campaign organizations has a youth
outreach entity.
Travis Korson, the grass-roots director of the
Virginia chapter, suggested framing marriage as an economic issue. “Gay
marriage undermines that basic family unit,” he said, and that, in turn,
hurts the economy.
The big, obvious question for anyone who cares
about winning more youth votes — and “without the next generation, you
don’t have a movement,” Liberty University vice president Johnnie Moore
said — is what went wrong in 2012 and what can be done to fix that in
the future.
Liberty University senior class president Chelsea
Patterson offered that “a lot of my peers see the GOP as kind of old
school,” suggesting the party needed some rebranding and a better
strategy of connecting with popular culture.
Hawkins said it was
because the party was too moderate. “We keep nominating moderates and
saying we need a big tent, but we keep losing.”
No one suggested
changing any positions, only finding better packaging for the ones they
already have. “I do not believe we should sacrifice our values to win
elections,” Koroson said.
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