If it wasn’t abundantly clear looking at the 2022 midterm election results, Republicans have a young-voter problem.
Both Democrats and Republicans are relatively gerontocratic when it comes to the lawmakers representing them. But Democrats have a large advantage when it comes to actual support from young people. And right-wing organizations targeting youth, like Turning Point USA, market themselves as Generation Z whisperers but don’t seem to have much to show for it.
In fact, some of their youth outreach — like Turning Point USA’s “urban engagement activism kit” — is evidence of how futile the GOP’s efforts truly are at the moment.
Given that reality, it’s no surprise that GOP elites are devising ways to blunt the impact of the youth vote.
In audio obtained by progressive activist Lauren Windsor and published Wednesday, prominent conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell can be heard complaining to Republican donors about the ease of voting access on college campuses. Neither NBC News nor MSNBC has independently verified the audio.
Mitchell, you may remember, advised former President Donald Trump on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. She was on Trump’s Jan.2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump pressured the state’s top election official to “find” enough votes to declare Trump the winner of the presidential election in Georgia.
In the newly released audio, reportedly recorded April 15 at a private GOP donor retreat, Mitchell warns that Georgia Democratic voting rights activist Stacey Abrams “has been in North Carolina.” She can be heard saying “statutory changes” (i.e., laws) will be needed to prevent money from “flowing into” three Democratic-leaning counties in the state.
Mitchell, a longtime Republican strategist, calls on her audience to look at the “young people effort” to vote, lamenting that polling places are too close to dormitories, which allows students to simply “roll out of…
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