Sharon Bernstein
Reuters
via Yahoo! News
8/5/2014
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Amir Zendehnam passionately supports marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, abortion rights and the Republican Party.
He is not alone. The 26-year-old aspiring restaurateur and chairman of the party’s West Los Angeles central committee, is one of a raft of ethnically diverse young libertarians who hold seats in L.A. County’s huge GOP apparatus, injecting youthful energy into its operations at a time when the state’s Republican Party is nearly moribund.
After winning control the executive board of the Los Angeles County Republican Party in December 2012, the “Liberty Kids,” as they call themselves, are seeing the fruits of their activism. This year one of their own is running as the Republican nominee for Congress from the San Gabriel Valley, with Zendehnam serving as policy adviser.
The Liberty Kids are challenging the party’s social conservatives and are drawing the attention of Democrats, who see liberal youth as part of their base. And in what could be a harbinger for the GOP, they have begun campaigning in other states, aiming to increase their influence beyond California…
The article continues at Yahoo! News.
Related: New “Young Outsiders” Voting Bloc Wholly Rejects Welfare State, Poll Finds
…A whopping 86 percent of Young Outsiders believe “government aid to the poor does more harm than good.” What’s more, more than three-fourths of them, 76 percent, said the government can’t afford to help the poor any more than it already is.
And an overwhelming 81 percent agreed that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
Savvy Republican politicians could capture this voting bloc and win elections if they stay positive and focus on smart economic solutions, some say…
GOP sees signs of Jewish voters drifting away from Democrats (video)
…Republicans believe that the deepening crisis in Gaza could ultimately loosen the grip that the Democratic Party has traditionally held upon American Jewish voters.
While declarations of a rift between Democrats and the Jewish community have proven premature in the past, things could be different this time, they assert …
Democrats Have a White Working Class Problem—and Not Just in the South
…The GOP’s base lives in small towns, the urban fringe, and rural areas. But it has tremendous implications for Democratic strategy. The party could “write off” white working class in the South and still win many elections, but it’s impossible to write off working Americans in all of the Red States or in all non-urban areas and still have a stable and enduring Democratic majority. Instead, such a majority will require increasing white working class support for Democrats in these areas…
