Young people might doom Trump and the GOP as soon as 2020 -- here's why

From the activism of the Parkland shooting survivors, to young people alarmed by climate change, it appears clear that millennials and Generation Z skew progressive.

As New York magazine points out, that trend—alongside several others—might destroy Trump in 2020 and bury the GOP in the long term.

"Republicans have long known that millennials were going to be a problem for their party. The only questions were 'How big?' and 'How soon?'"

Columnist Eric Levitz points to several trends that bode poorly for Republicans.

"The bulk of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 saw Bill Clinton preside over an age of (relative) peace and prosperity — and then George W. Bush steer their nation into failed wars and economic collapse," Levitz writes. "Political science research suggests that a voter’s partisan preferences tend to be deeply informed by their evaluations of presidential performance in adolescence and early adulthood."

A few major set backs for Democrats, including Republicans' resurgence in the Senate and the rise of Trump, could be explained by the fact that young people generally tend to vote at lower rates than older voters—and older voters skew conservative.

But the youngest voters, Levitz points out, voted at higher rates in 2018 than is standard for their age. So Republicans have much to fear in 2020.

"In sum: If late-life reality doesn’t bite Generation X hard enough to turn those slackers into reactionaries — and if swing-voting boomers start worrying more about prescription costs than Central American migrants — millennials and Gen-Zers could make the conservative movement noncompetitive in national elections as soon as 2020."