A new Pew Research Center poll underscores an emerging fact: conservative Republicans and/or Tea Party Republicans who are battling same-sex marriage are increasingly oh, so 20th century — even among young Republicans who favor same-sex marriage:
Young people continue to be the strongest proponents of same-sex marriage. And as public support for same-sex marriage continues to grow, the gap between young and old is nowhere more striking than within the Republican coalition.
Today, 61% of Republicans and Republican leaners under 30 favor same-sex marriage while just 35% oppose it. By contrast, just 27% of Republicans ages 50 and older favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry.
That’s about as graphic a generation gap as you can find.
This generation gap among Republicans comes against a backdrop of rapidly changing public opinion overall on the issue. More than half the public (54%) now favors allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry, a record high in Pew Research surveys, in keeping with findings from other recent polls. Democrats and Republicans remain on opposite sides of the issue, with 69% of Democrats and Democratic leaning independents favoring same-sex marriage compared with 39% Republicans and Republican leaners.
On this issue, young Republicans’ views are more in line with Democrats. And while support for gay marriage is higher among younger Democrats and Democratic leaners than older Democrats, even Democrats 65 and older favor same-sex marriage by a margin of about two-to-one.
The poll also finds younger GOPers differ from conservative older GOPers:
Just 18% of Republicans under 30 say “more gay and lesbian couples raising children” is a bad thing for American society, while 26% say it is a good thing (56% either say it doesn’t make a difference or they don’t know).
Older Republicans take the opposite side on these issues.
If you add to that the GOP losing emerging groups — Latinos, African Americans, women, gay voters — its clear the Republican Party in national terms is in a race against the clock and it’s one they can’t win. Voter ID laws and attempts to use other voter suppression techniques and mask it with defense-lawyer arguments, will only delay what now seems inevitable: a generational attitudinal shift.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.