Op-Ed

In Congress, Republicans Are The Party Of Youth. Democrats Are SO OLD It’s Embarrassing

Elise Stefanik public domain, Bernie Sanders Reuters/Carlo Allegri

Michael Gerini Freelance writer
Font Size:

Due to a massive number of incumbent retirees and potentially toxic presidential politics, conventional wisdom suggests that the Republican Party will lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in 2018. With 38 house retirees many pundits are predicting a Republican collapse, but they fail to read between the lines. Twenty-one of these 38 retiring Republicans are in districts with a partisan voting index (PVI) of R+10, while only two are in districts with D+ PVI. Furthermore, four Democratic representatives in Republican leaning districts are retiring, further mitigating possible losses.

With the disproportionate number of retirees in safe Republican districts the Republican Party has an unprecedented opportunity. Whoever wins the Republican primaries in these districts will most likely win the general election. With these nearly guaranteed victories, the Republican Party can choose a slate of candidates that includes more females, Hispanics and younger politicians. If the Republicans enact such a strategy, it can be the death blow to the Democratic Party’s use of identity politics.

The Democratic leadership in the House has an average age of 72, while it is 48 for Republican leaders. The chairmen and ranking members of the Democratic Party are on average 68 years old, as opposed to 59 for Republicans. Despite Democratic attempts to pigeonhole the Republicans as the party of old white people and old white men in particular, they are in fact the younger party. With the retiring of many incumbents, the republicans have a chance to increase this age disparity to their own advantage. If this is achieved attacks upon the Republicans as the party of ‘old white men’ will ring hollow when coming from the likes of Henry Waxman (78), Nancy Pelosi (78), Chuck Schumer (67), and Dianne Feinstein (87). The 115th congress is one of the oldest in history, the Republicans have a historic chance to claim the mantle of youth for the next several elections.

There are 84 female representatives in the House, 23 of which are Republicans and six of those are retiring. There is a gender gap between the two parties but it is not so large that it cannot be bridged. The Republican party does not need to compete with the Democrats in terms of numbers for the sake of tokenism, but it should encourage more women to seek office and influence in its ranks. Not too long ago, Olympia Snowe and Christie Whitman were strong independent voices in the GOP and the party still has insightful influences like Susanna Martinez. Encouraging young women to attempt to replace retiring congressman and to challenge vulnerable Democrats will give the party both good optics in contrast to Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Warren, as well as fresh perspectives outside of its normal pool of potential candidates.

In the 2004 presidential election Pres. George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanic voters. Perhaps even more astonishingly, despite his perceived ‘racist’ rhetoric Donald Trump won 29 percent of Hispanic voters, nearly one-third of all Hispanic male voters and one-fourth of all Hispanic female voters. These results should be encouraging to every Republican operative and should be worrying to the DNC.

Against an increasingly leftist Democratic party, the GOP has an opportunity to gain ground with a growing segment of the U.S. population. Polling consistently shows that the economy is the most important issue to Hispanic voters. The Democratic Party nearly nominated a self-professed socialist in the 2016 Presidential Election, the Republican Party can use issues of economic freedom as points of contention to attract Hispanic voters. Furthermore, unlike the Democratic Party which has currently relegated its Hispanic leaders to the DNC, the Republican Party has Hispanic elected officials that are major influences in the party such as Marco Rubio, Susanna Martinez, and Jeb Bush (though not Hispanic his wife and children are and he speaks Spanish very well). A large portion of the retiring Republicans in the House are from states with a considerable proportion of Hispanic voters (e.g. TX, CA, AZ, FL). This should allow the GOP to recruit and run a large slate of Hispanic candidates. If the Republican Party can moderate its stance on the border wall and illegal immigration, as well as cultivate a group of young Hispanic legislators, it can emerge from the 2018 elections stronger at its core than most believe possible.

With the impending short-term losses coming in the 2018 midterm elections, the Republican Party has unique opportunities to appeal to the majority of the electorate. If the RNC acts counter-intuitively and embraces the large scale retirement of incumbents, it can overhaul its image. If it welcomes younger, more female, and more Hispanic candidates, the GOP can turn the tables on the Democratic Party and make them look like the old men of the Politburo that they are becoming.

Michael Gerini is a former member of the armed forces and a first-generation American.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel