Editor's Note: With the 2016 elections approaching, it's been no secret that marijuana is increasingly becoming an issue that Presidential hopefuls will need to address. Will the moderate approach–which aims to please marijuana advocates while not alienating those anti-marijuana Republicans, and usually comes in the form of: "States' rights should be withheld, though I don't agree with marijuana legalization" (as possible GOP contender Senator Ted Cruz recently said)–be enough? With a majority of young Republicans in favor of legalizing cannabis, and the issue seeming to elicit enough passion to draw voters out to the polls, Republicans are going to have to carefully manage their positions on the matter, and if they outright oppose marijuana legalization and states' rights to do so, they may be walking a fine line between party and pot advocates.
Nearly two-thirds of Millennials who identify as Republican support legalizing marijuana, while almost half of older GOP Gen-Xers do, according to a recently released Pew survey that could be an indicator of where the debate is heading.
While the Pew Research Center survey published on Friday shows a 14 percentage point gap between Republicans and Democrats under the age of 34, six-in-10 GOP-leaning Millennials still said they favor legalizing cannabis. Seventy-seven percent of surveyed Democrats in the same age group held that view.
