Fox News has the oldest audience on television, and their struggles to attract young viewers mirror a Republican Party that according to a new study is literally dying off.
Daniel J. McGraw of Politico Magazine crunched the numbers and confirmed that Republicans have a party that is dying:
By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.
Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls, and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.
McGraw found that Millennials are becoming a solidly Democratic voting bloc, and younger voters outnumber Baby Boomers. The net result is that if Republicans don’t attract a larger percentage younger voters, they could be looking at a deficit of 2.5 million votes on Election Day 2016. The Republican base is older white rural voters, and these voters pass on; they aren’t being replaced in the party with young voters.
If this trend were to continue over the long-term, the Republican Party would shrink.
For years, Fox News’ ratings with younger viewers have been plummeting. Fox News is the top cable news network in a declining genre because they have cornered the market on white, mostly male, Republican viewers at or over 65 years old. Fox News has lost 30% of their younger viewers. Fox News’ median audience has shrunk to 1.1 million. As their older viewers have died off, Fox News has been unable to replace them with younger viewers. Fox’s big move to combat this was to move Sean Hannity’s angry Republican senior center hour to 10 PM and give Megyn Kelly the timeslot after Bill O’Reilly. It hasn’t worked.
Fox News has already found out what the Republican Party is going to learn. Throwing a younger face on the same old ideas of opposing gay marriage, immigration reform, climate change, and making college less affordable while promoting income inequality is not going to fool younger voters.
The ideas matter. If Fox News and the Republican Party don’t get a clue, both will go extinct.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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