Neither Ros-Lehtinen nor Rubio speaks to the aspirations and outlook of this new majority — and indeed, if you look closely at the voting patterns in exile community, you can see cracks in the foundation of the bloc beginning to emerge. According to exit polling in the 2008 election by Bendixen & Associates, 84 percent of Cubans in the Miami area over the age of 55 voted for John McCain, a traditional Republican Cuba hawk — but Barack Obama, the first major presidential candidate with a record of opposition to the embargo, garnered 55 percent of the under-30 vote. This year’s election also saw the second serious challenge in as many elections from a Cuban-American politician running in a Florida House race on a platform of engaging with Cuba. Joe Garcia, a former leader of Mas Canosa’s Cuban American National Foundation who has reinvented himself as a Cuba policy reformer, got 42 percent of the vote against Cuba-hardliner David Rivera — a loss, but in an exile-heavy district and an election year that favored Republicans, a hopeful sign for the future. ~Arturo Lopez-Levy

Ros-Lehtinen and Rubio’s older exile mentality is representative of a broader problem Republicans have had in thinking about all kinds of policy, but especially foreign policy. It is almost as if these people are in a time warp and the last twenty years have not really happened. We see this in the support for an absurdly outdated Cuba embargo policy that Cuban-Americans themselves increasingly reject, fanciful confidence in democracy promotion in the Near East on the basis of what happened during the “third wave” of democratization at the end of the Cold War, and wistful nostalgia for the “good old days” of Kemalist military dominance in Turkey. As far as Russia is concerned, it is as though the Cold War never really ended and Republicans remain committed to containment of Russia when containment has long since ceased to serve any American interest. It is not just that Republican leaders are losing young voters, but also that they are losing young voters because they seem incapable of adapting to the world as it is today. Part of this is reliance on the votes of older voters who are wedded to worldviews that have decreasing relevance, but part of it is simply a lack of imagination and a failure to pay attention. This may be most obvious with regard to Cuba policy, but it is typical of Republican foreign policy views across the board.