President Donald Trump's approval is 11 points above water with young Americans? Did someone slip acid into my lunchtime martini? I don't often write about polls, so please bear with me — I only mention this one to tell you about a sea change you can feel going on all around you.
According to YouGov, Trump went to a 53%-42% favorable rating today, way up from a 27-point deficit (30%-57%) in 2017. "Considering YouGov is an institute-leaning Democrat, it's a landslide," one X user added.
For those of you reading this who were either too young or too old to have been in the 18-29 youth cohort during the '80s, let me share with you just how freakin' top-of-the-world AWESOME it was to be a young Republican when Ronald Reagan was president...
...and just how unbelievably many of us there were.
For little kids growing up in the ugliness and malaise of the '70s like I did, Reagan specifically and conservatism generally were huge gulps of fresh air. His first inaugural marked a turning point in our young lives, and his 1984 "Morning in America" reelection campaign sealed the deal.
While I was too young to vote for Reagan, I did some volunteer campaign work for him and GOP congressional candidate Jack Buechner in the summer and autumn of '84. I was 15. I cast my first vote for president for George Bush in 1988.
So did the overwhelming majority of my classmates, if this Totally True VodkaPundit Tale™ is anything to go by.
As a freshman at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the 1987-88 school year, I took a political science class taught by Professor Rick Hardy. I waited until the spring semester to enroll in Dr. Hardy's class for one reason: his quadrennial mock presidential election, in which his 1,000-plus students served as the primary and national election voters (properly distributed by party and state), and as the candidates' campaign staffs.
Those mock elections were kind of a big deal. Hardy's students had predicted the party result of every presidential election going back to 1972 if I recall correctly. The one I was involved in didn't just get a fair amount of national press attention, but the George Bush and Bob Dole campaigns thought it was important enough to send official surrogates to Mizzou to run their candidates' mock campaigns.
I volunteered to run the Pete du Pont campaign. Du Pont couldn't afford to send a surrogate. We might not have even received any campaign materials. I had to go on stage to make my pitch hot on the heels of Jeb! Bush (again, IIRC) and Dole's regional campaign manager, whose name I don't recall.
I was awesome, BTW, getting just as strong a crowd response — pitching an almost unknown candidate — as the seasoned pros.
But I digress.
Hardy was the only Republican in Mizzou's poli sci department and also, according to a poli sci major who lived down the hall from me in the Hudson dorm, gave the least biased lectures. He worked carefully to make sure his mock election electorate was a fair representation of the actual electorate — and that was the rub in January of 1988.
He couldn't find enough student Democrats.
Emphasis added. Because wow.
To give you a rough idea of how different things were on campus back then, College Republicans at Mizzou outnumbered Young Democrats by two to one.
Two to one.
This is the same University of Missouri-Columbia campus where the radical lefties put on protests in 2015 so effective that several administrators were forced to quit. So effective that enrollment dropped by more than a third the next academic year and has yet to fully recover.
Here's a quick reminder of just some of what went down ten years ago.
2015: Top @Mizzou admin resigned after sustained protests by students who claimed racism everywhere. Jonathan Butler led the protests w/a hunger strike. He said he was jumped by racist whites & his door was vandalized. WSJ investigation found NO EVIDENCE. https://t.co/4Yup29PXIm pic.twitter.com/mQ5wXxyVyA
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) March 20, 2019
College Republicans who had still been riding Reagan's coattails in 1988 were almost nowhere to be seen among the "progressive" mobs that had taken over the school. We went from the afterglow of Morning in America to "RACISM IS EVERYWHERE," even when they had to make it up.
GenX — these are my people — broke harder for Trump last November than any other age cohort. I don't know who the Republican nominee will be in 2028, but it feels like GenZ — these are my sons' people — will break even harder for them.
It feels like morning in America.
Again.
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