The Grand Old Party has a problem: It's old and it's getting older by the minute. Time, quite literally, is not on the GOP's side when it comes to its 2016 base voters. Daniel J. McGraw
assessed the implications:
There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.
The party’s core is dying off by the day.
Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting fewer first-time voters. Unless the party is able to make inroads with new voters, or discover a fountain of youth, the GOP’s slow demographic slide will continue election to election. Actuarial tables make that part clear, but just how much of a problem for the GOP is this?
After comparing 2012 election polls with census mortality rates, McGraw concluded that about 2.75 million people who voted for Romney will have died by 2016, while closer to 2.3 million Obama voters will pass, putting Democrats at a 453,000-person advantage. That gap only widens when he adds in new millennial voters, assuming they vote approximately the way they have in the last couple election cycles.
In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.
Clearly, these are some rough guesstimates, but you get the gist.