Morley and Mike Featured on Front Page of SF Chronicle Today
In addition to their Op-ed in Sunday's LA Times, NDN's Morley Winograd and Mike Hais were featured in an excellent front-page story by Carla Marinucci in today's San Francisco Chronicle. The article, entitled "Is Meghan McCain the New Face of the GOP?", looks at how Republicans can appeal to Millennial voters. From the article:
The 24-year-old daughter of U.S. Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential candidate, is a regular political blogger and most certainly not her mother Cindy's serene, St. John-suit-wearing stereotype of a Republican woman.
In brash blog posts on the Daily Beast - "The GOP doesn't understand sex" - and outpouring of posts on Twitter, she has described herself as a pro-sex, "pro-life, pro-gay-marriage Republican," one who experts say may be at the forefront of a new GOP breed: the "Meghan McCain Republican."
That GOP faction is younger and interested in fiscal responsibility and less government involvement in people's lives, while supporting environmentalism and civic engagement. They're part of the millennial generation, the largest and most diverse generation in American history, whose voters - born starting in the early 1980s - cast ballots for Barack Obama by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.
"That's the kind of positioning it will take to appeal to more millennials," says author Mike Hais, a fellow with NDN, the Washington think tank formerly known as the New Democrat Network. And the party will be in a stronger position "to the extent that Meghan and others will find a way to appeal to Republicans by de-emphasizing the extremes on social issues."
NDN fellow Morley Winograd, who along with Hais co-authored "Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics," says the younger McCain's growing following underscores an "underlying conflict" in the party - between opposing forces and generations. The co-authors will speak tonight at an NDN seminar in San Francisco that will examine the effects of the millennial vote. Winograd says that vote will determine the GOP's future "for the next 20 years," when the generation will comprise 1 out of every 3 American voters.
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