Why is GOP waging war on Millennials?

The party is betting that the future won’t happen

Fellow old people, imagine a candidate so lit that he’s backed by nearly three out of four voters ages 18 to 29. And imagine that the candidate getting your fam turnt (translation: your pals super excited) is not a YouTube star or a transgender activist determined to oppose cruel bathroom laws. This new member of your squad is 60-year-old Democrat Phil Murphy — a former Goldman Sachs executive about to become governor of New Jersey.

Murphy’s fire (yeah, hot) performance with younger Millennial voters was nearly matched by 58-year-old Democrat Ralph Northam, a former Army surgeon and the next governor of Virginia. He won about seven out of 10 voters ages 18 to 29. And like Murphy, he isn’t exactly the next Harry Styles.

The Democratic victories last month fall well within the tradition of parties doing well when they don’t hold the White House. But what’s notable is that younger voters are generally mad AF at President Trump and ready to clap back at the ballot box.

Trump’s appeal to Americans closest to death is what’s keeping his historically low ratings as high as they are, says pollster William Jordan. Among younger voters, however, he has already sunk to the level of George W. Bush in 2008 — after the Hurricane Katrina debacle, two failed wars and the beginning of the Great Recession.

So how is Trump’s GOP handling a hemorrhage of young voters who are establishing voting patterns that could last the rest of their adult lives? By trolling them out of the middle class.

Cosmopolitan’s Robin Marty counted the potential ways the House and Senate tax plans hurt young people: higher taxes, more expensive student loans, rising insurance premiums, underfunded public schools, lower home values and a withering safety net. “What’s very clear through all of this is that the group that most pays are the younger people,” Eugene Steuerle, of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, told The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein.

It makes sense that when you cut taxes for the richest Americans and corporations, the winners are the people who’ve had the longest time to accumulate wealth, businesses and stocks. In other words, older people. It’s the younger people, meanwhile, who are most likely to be punished by cuts Republicans will likely demand to pay for these tax giveaways and a deficit that was rising even before this budget-busting scheme.

And the GOP tax plan is far from the party’s only policy that seems finely tuned to tick off the newest generation of voters. Repealing “net neutrality” protections isn’t popular and could be especially disastrous for the Republican Party if it ends up compromising the Internet experience Millennials grew up expecting.

They don’t like obstacles to birth control, either. “Few Millennials have moral qualms about birth control, and they generally support policies to make contraception widely available and affordable,” according to a 2015 poll by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute.

In a new NBC News/ GenForward poll, only 19% of Millennials identified with the GOP, and 71% said the party does not care about people like them.

Sure, there are warning signs for the Democrats. The same NBC News/ GenForward poll found that 71% of Millennials want a third party, and in 2016 white Millennials voted more like their parents than their multiracial peers.

But there isn’t a third party on the horizon, and the Millennial generation will be the most diverse America has ever seen. And for now, their No. 1 issue is health care. They seem much more worried about the government coming for their insurance than their guns.

The future is happening, and Republicans are betting trillions of dollars against it. It’s enough to make you wonder why they aren’t even trying to fix a problem that, like Trump’s court appointees, could last generations. Maybe they know something we don’t?

Well, there is that old conservative proverb: If you can’t beat them, stop them — from voting.

Jason Sattler, aka @LOLGOP, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and a columnist for The National Memo.