Progressives panic as millennials flee: ‘You damn right, I don’t have any loyalty to Democrats’

OPINION:

Progressives are in a bit of a panic lately, looking at the results of a recent focus group study that shows their core base of millennials are abandoning the leftist ideology in droves, jumping out of the Democratic Party’s ship to take their votes — gasp! — elsewhere.

Why? Apparently, millennials, and particularly millennials of color — of which is 44 percent of that demographic — are sick and tired of being taken for granted.

The chicken’s coming home to roost. Suddenly, blacks aren’t content to simply and automatically pull the poll levers for Democratic Party candidates, or progressives. Now, they’re demanding actual representation. They’re decrying the feeling of being “taken for granted,” according to results from a focus group conducted by the Civic Engagement Fund in Florida and Wisconsin.

Here’s the line that really slaps, though.

“You’re damn right, I don’t have any loyalty to Democrats,” one participant in the Florida focus group said, in The Hill. “If Republicans want to get real about shit that’s happening in my community, I would vote for every one of them. Then maybe Democrats would take us serious too.”

What’s astonishing about the statement is that Democrats, progressives and pretty much anyone running for political office with a left-leaning vision and platform could bank on the support of blacks and other minorities. The overall attitude was: Well, who else would they vote for — a Republican?

This research shows yes. Maybe.

And consider this: The Brookings Institution reported millennials to be the largest group of voters by 2020 — and in 2015, more than 44 percent of millennials were “people of color,” the Hill said.

Can you say President Donald Trump wins a second term?

“We are not going to get back to national majorities again without these voters,” said Cornell Belcher, the guy who conducted the focus groups for the Civic Engagement Fund.

Interesting. The gravy train for the Democrats appears to be coming to a halt. Today’s minorities aren’t automatically voting left. And Republicans now have a sizable opening — and it’s one that should start with a reminder of the history of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and which party fought the hardest, with votes, for their passage. Hint: It wasn’t the Dems.