PPP national poll shows GOP weakness in age demos

  The latest PPP national poll is out. 

While it shows Clinton "only" four points ahead, we should bear in mind that Obama beat Romney by "only" four points. 

From the summary (emphasis added): 

The race is shaping up pretty much as you would expect along demographic lines. Clinton leads 51/36 with women, 82/13 with Hispanics, 91/5 with African Americans, and 57/28 with young voters. Trump leads 48/37 with men, 51/32 with whites, and 51/36 with seniors.

Clinton has a 39/35 advantage with independents. Trump's actually getting more crossover support with 10% of Democrats to Clinton's 7% of Republicans. That's partially because of some Bernie Sanders fans continuing to hold out from giving their support to Clinton- among Democrats and independents with a favorable opinion of Sanders 79% are voting for Clinton to 7% for Trump, 3% for Stein, and 2% for Johnson with 9% remaining undecided. If Clinton could even win over just half of those folks her support would go up to 49% and give her an 8 point lead.

 I'm unsure how many supposed "Sanders supporters" are even really Democrats to begin with. It's become apparent over the course of the primary that a lot of "independents" (i.e. Republican-leaning voters) comprise the Sanders camp. These are voters that hate Trump because he's not a 'real' Republican, and hate Clinton because 'real' Republicans are required to hate all Clintons by definition. Winning over half seems possible, though. 

  As for the 10% of Democrats supporting Trump, that doesn't mean much. First, PPP showed 13% of Democrats supporting Romney on the eve of the 2012 election, and 13% also in October. So Trump's 10% of Democrats is actually worse than Romney's losing share. Second, this was supposed to be Trump's big edge -- his appeal to "Reagan Democrats". 

  Clinton leading with independents is important, because Romney lead independents by by five points in October 2012 -- and still lost. 

  As far as the stupid "oversampling" (a/k/a "unskew") argument, the D/R/I of this latest national poll was 39/34/27. Current polling shows: 

   That's a current D/R/I of 38/35/25. So no "oversampling" of Democrats. 

  But what's more interesting in the bigger picture is the age demographics. 
On the generic ballot, it's clear that senior citizens are the Republican Party's key age demo. 

  This isn't a "head-to-head" (h2h) between candidates. This is a hypothetical preference for President assuming ideal candidates. In other words, it's a best-case scenario for Republicans. I should note that PPP showed seniors breaking 52/45 in Romney's favour on the eve of the election. Senior citizens were the exact same proportion of the sample in both polls: 20%. 
This means that the GOP gets 10.6% of the electorate (.20 * .53) by winning seniors with a 15-point advantage. It might also be important to note that PPP ended up with a 50/47 result in Obama's favour on Election Eve. The actual result was 51/47. So, pretty accurate. 

  As you can see from the age breakdown on the current generic ballot, all other age groups either break evenly or go to the Democrats. The average life expectancy is around 82. A whole lot of this demographic won't make it to 2020, and they'll be replaced by voters who aren't nearly as favourable to the GOP. The age demo will still favour Republicans, but the GOP can't afford to lose any voters -- much less their key demographic. If only 47% of seniors favour the GOP, that will bring their share of the electorate down to 9.4%. A Party that is losing national elections by four points can't afford to lose nearly an entire point and still hope to win. 

  Some attrition will also take place in the 46-65 age group, as well. This split demo will be diluted by voters favouring the Democrats by six points. I wouldn't expect any kind of dramatic shift over four years, but the split in the 45-65 group will probably be slightly in favour of the Democrats. 

  You also have to consider the influence that these older voters have on the younger voters, especially in 'red' states. Without these seniors snarling and bellowing at their adult children about the evil Democrats, the impact of right-wing propaganda will lessen. The culture war talking points that the GOP uses to animate much of their base will fall on increasingly disinterested ears.  

  All of this assumes, of course, that the GOP will continue on their same course. There isn't much hope of that course changing. The Party "establishment" has been thoroughly discredited in the primary, and will undoubtedly be blamed by the Republican base for Trump's loss -- just as they were blamed for Romney's loss. With the Party organisation no longer having credibility, all of the Republican 'bench' having firmly tied themselves to the current course, and the base firmly entrenched in a bubble reality alternating between fear and outrage, where will any new course originate from? 

  We've seen a remarkable polarisation in the electorate. Most of the Republican base now lives in a different reality than the rest of nation, and this reality is built on conspiracy theories and 'facts' that are no longer reconcilable as "differences of opinion". You are either "in" or you are "out", and there aren't any new people getting "in". There is no effort made to persuade outsiders to join this bubble reality. Anyone who isn't already "in" is presumed to be evil or stupid, or both. This base simultaneously crows arrogantly that they are the majority and whimpers that they are also an oppressed minority. It's more like a tribal identification or religious indoctrination than it is a coherent political movement. Fads and heroes are embraced and soon forgotten, with no memory that they were ever embraced in the first place. Abandoned talking points are picked up years later and shouted anew as fervently as if they were never abandoned at all. 

  Over all of this is a strange desire to return to the past -- a past that is hazily misremembered and cast in black and white. More or less, this past is the 1950's -- nearly sixty years ago. It's little wonder that senior citizens are the key demographic of the Party, with this in mind. It's not only a time of strictly-enforced conformity (giving the lie to the "liberty" narrative), but also a time when minorities had very little in the way of rights or dignity. Oddly, it's also a time when labour unions were strong, but that part is left out of the hazy picture.

  Nobody under the age of 50 remembers this period with glowing fondness, mostly because they weren't alive back then. For these voters, it was a time of racial segregation. It was a time when you couldn't be an individual, but were tightly locked in someone else's vision of how to dress, speak, behave, and which opinions to hold. It was time when gays lived in quiet desperation, terrified of losing their jobs, being brutally beaten, and despised by all if their terrible secret ever got out. It was a time of few career options for women, and all of them were low-paid occupations. You could beat your wife (or most women, for that matter) with impunity. You could beat, cheat, or insult any minority without consequence. Basically, if you weren't a white male, it was an "anything goes" situation. There was no shortage of craven cretins eagerly willing to enforce this social order with their fists, their economic power, or with ropes and guns in other cases. And good luck if you weren't a Christian. 

  If this sounds like a "tough sale" to voters, it is. Were a sufficient number of Republicans to actually think the consequences through, most would reject a return to this social order. Instead, they know it can never happen so it becomes an aspirational goal and an element of tribal identification. In this purpose, it can only produce frustration and disenchantment with those that they elect, because they can never possibly deliver a return to the Golden Age. 

  The Republican Party has engineered a disastrous long-term situation for itself in order to achieve a short-term gain. And that short-term gain has instead become little more than a holding action. It virtually guarantees that elected Republican office-holders will have a short political life, because they can't enact the crazy brand of change that their base so strongly desires. It creates a revolving door of crazy, and even more crazy, candidates making bigger and bigger promises while failing miserably to get results. It burns through the 'bench' of electable options and leaves the Party with only clowns to run. And so we see the current desire for "outsider" candidates on the Right, whose lack of appeal outside of the Party base in seen as a major asset. 

  Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, a candidate simply has to be "not crazy". This sets a low bar, and leads to disillusionment and frustration with a perceived "lack of progress" in that Party's base. The fervent Republican hope is that their "holding action" can put enough stress on the Democratic Party that it will begin to splinter and put forward unelectable candidates in its own right. But the age demographics, inherent instability, and gaping schisms within the Right don't give the GOP sufficient time for this strategy to play out. The Democratic Party is well-accustomed to coalition politics, while the Republican Party is not. It chafes at the compromises made as a coalition, and has lost its vaunted "unified messaging". It's very identity has become lost and subsumed into little more than an "anti-Democrat" Party with no real principles of its own. 

  It's a political game of "chicken" that the GOP can't win, nor can it afford to lose. When the string is played out, the Republican Party will be left in a shambles. The Democrats will have free reign to shape the narrative. And most Republicans will 'forget' that ever believed any of the stuff that they now hold to be Sacred Truth. But the nation will have squandered a decade in a generational tantrum.