Young Conservatives in the Wilderness

In The Washington Post, Ian Shapira notes that it's hard out here for a young GOP gun:

Recession-related reasons aside, right-of-center young people looking for steady work with an ideological bent are having an unusually difficult time. For much of the past decade, young conservatives enjoyed an array of job opportunities in the Republican-controlled Congress and at insulated, well-funded nonprofit organizations. But since Democrats gained control in 2006, many prized slots on Senate and House committees started going to the new majority. And now, there's no Republican administration in power to offer jobs to its own.

Young conservatives could apply for regular jobs, they acknowledge, but they also believe that their 20s are a safe age -- likely no children, often unmarried -- to start low- to moderate-paying jobs that potentially could launch prestigious careers in politics or public policy. The tough job market only reinforces their sense of being marooned.

At Heritage, one of Washington's premier conservative think tanks, the organization's Young Leaders Program job bank is receiving résumés from 20-somethings nationwide. But employers are not tapping the source as much as in past years, a sign that the potent conservative think tanks and other machinelike organizations of the Bush years might be waning. "It's gone from maybe three or four calls a day to one or two," said David Barnes, the program's assistant director. "It's bad."

Out of power and lacking an outlet for new talent, it looks like the fabled conservative youth factory is grinding to a halt. Not only that, but young conservatives are feeling more and more alienated from their own generation:

There's hope among today's young conservatives -- new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele just announced an "off the hook" public relations blitz to woo young people -- but there's also a lot of alienation. Those 18 to 29, part of the "millennial generation," voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the presidential election, according to polling data. Some at this happy hour won't name their employers in social settings with contemporaries because they fear it will create awkwardness.
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"I just say that I work at a nonprofit," says Margaret Taylor, 24, who won't say for publication which organization she works for, other than that it's economically oriented.

[...]

At the Union Pub, Dustin Siggins, 24, says he sometimes uses humor to deflect the awkwardness of being on the margins of his generation. "I met a girl today at the gym from Boston College. She was getting a law degree from George Washington. She was cute," he says. "But she wants to work for the ACLU, and I said, 'Oh, you're one of those.' "

Later, in a phone interview, Siggins says he struggles with some of his party's more culturally orthodox ideals. "Because I am in this generation and was raised in a pro-gay-marriage era, I am only a little bit against gay marriage, but only a little, like 53 percent to 47," he says. "I have about a dozen gay friends, 30 or 20, and they would all back me up. In college, I used to have lunch with them. . . . We went ice skating once."

Scott Keeter from PEW notes that, if not necessarily a death knell, this alienation is a symptom indicative of a potential collapse of the GOP's status as a strong national party:

Scott Keeter, survey research director at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, suggests there may be broad reasons why Republicans are not in sync with millennials. "I don't want to go too far and say this is a lost generation for the Republican Party," Keeter says. "But it's a serious portent that [young people's affection for the Democratic Party] is not dependent on Obama -- it's a function of demographic shifts, and that this generation came of age when the Republican brand has been damaged."

Here's what the GOP is up against: Analysis of network exit polls by The Washington Post and Pew show that in terms of both party identification and vote margin, the Democrats' advantage over Republicans among voters younger than 30 is as large as it has been in more than three decades. Looking at party affiliation, for instance, in 2008, 46 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds identified as Democrats, 27 percent as independents and 27 percent as Republicans, about the same as the breakdown in 1972. But as recently as 2000, there was much more parity: 36 percent were Democrats, 29 percent independents and 35 percent Republicans.