Voting for president shouldn’t have anything to do with how cool the candidates are, but if the GOP truly wants to connect with more young voters, they can’t ignore the influence of the culture.

Elena Lathrop of Breitbart reports.

The Youth Vote: Making the GOP Cool Again

Just because young voters historically do not show up to the polls in large numbers does not mean they should be overlooked. They may later work in education, the media, or Hollywood – three major institutions that play a pivotal role in shaping political opinions and, quite frankly, are dominated by the Left. If the GOP ever hopes of winning the youth vote, culture cannot be ignored.

Spending my college years as an outspoken conservative at UCLA, where Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore easily fill a large lecture hall while David Horowitz brings protests and walk-out demonstrations, was challenging, to say the least. I’ve always enjoyed the sense of rebellion and solidarity I felt with other conservatives on campus, but for others, it can be a very dark, lonely experience. The word “Republican” often brings up notions of racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry, greed, Bible-clinging, and closed-mindedness, to name a few. Republicans themselves know that these are nothing more than absurd stereotypes and therefore do not give them the time of day. Name-calling is just not the GOP’s game. But for youth who are typically preoccupied with being accepted by their peers, these types of associations are avoided as much as possible. Especially on a college campus, where so-called “tolerance” and identity politics are all the rage, it’s simply not cool to be conservative.

In order to speak to the youth, the GOP must first focus on culture, which is a war we are currently losing on several fronts. Young Americans constantly hear the liberal message in the movies they see, the music they listen to, the television they watch, and the textbooks they read, without even knowing it. Where does the GOP’s message fit in here? It doesn’t.