I haven’t seen a ton of cross-tabs from recent presidential polls where the numbers are broken down by age group. But the PPP Iowa poll shows Obama “lead(s) with young voters at 64-29”. In Colorado he has a “58-38 lead among voters under 45.’
In 2008, Obama won the 18-29 age group by 34 points.
In the data at the Roper center, going back to 1976, no candidate has ever won any group by as much as 34 points ever. And in a typical year, the variation among different age groups is small. (The other cases of one candidate dominating an age group are mostly from 1984, when Reagan won by a landslide, dominating every age group, albeit some more than others, whereas in 2008, Obama lost the 65+ vote.)
The age shift started in 2004 with Kerry winning 18-24 by a lot and losing most others. It has no precedent prior to that.
I know PEOPLE GET MORE CONSERVATIVE AS THEY GET OLDER. Not so fast:
In general, however, this points toward the idea that partisan identification — while not exactly being “hard-wired” — can be quite persistent as the voter moves through her lifecourse. Voters who came of age during the eight years of the Bush Presidency are roughly eight points more Democratic than the rest of the country; that advantage could be worth an extra point or two to Democrats throughout the next half-century.
One of the big mysteries to me about the current Republican party is why they haven’t tried to change their message to appeal to younger voters. Gay-bashing, immigrant-bashing, and slut-shaming have almost no appeal to younger voters, no matter what Cardinal Dolan and Kris Kobach tell you.
I don’t know exactly what caused the huge shift among younger voters. Some of it is the aforementioned poor Republican messaging, but there must be more to it. My guess is that the Republican machine depends on control of institutions, especially media and religious institutions, and that young voters have mostly deserted these institutions.
The loose ladies and strapping young bucks are too busy sexting each other and writing things on Facebook to absorb the proper dose of propaganda.
Culture of Truth
Because that is who they are. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t be Republicans. They’d be Democrats. Blue dogs we’d bash, instead of GOPpers we’re mystified by.
Also, they identify themselves, as do many progressives, by what they are against as much as what they are for. As in, GOP may not be “for torture” but liberals are ‘against it’. Dems may not be “for abortion” but Cons are ‘against it’.
Likewise, gays, but I’ve said before in 10 years the GOP will claim they were for gay rights and Dems were against it.
Pavonis
When the images on the news when you first become interested in politics are piles of naked bodies at Abu Gharib and New Orleans flooding while the GOP blabbers on about gay marriage and tax cuts, it leaves a deep impression. At least that’s how I turned permanently against the GOP as I came of age.
Suffern ACE
They do change their positions. When they are no longer seeking office. Tom Trancero on pot legalization comes to mind.
Patricia Kayden
Or perhaps the young ladies and gents are simply living life in a more diverse country where they hang around with gays, minorities, immigrants, etc. It’s harder to accept the Repubs’ “us against everyone who ain’t like us” message, when your environment is so mixed up.
reflectionephemeral
One of the big mysteries to me about the current Republican party is why they haven’t tried to change their message to appeal to younger voters.
You get at this later on, but I think it’s a different point to mention the Iron Law of Institutions– that people within an institution value their power within it more than the institution’s power in the world at large.
There’s no latitude for anyone in the GOP to soften their gay-bashing and sotto voce race-bating. People get excommunicated from the GOP for matters of tone all the time– Bob Inglis in SC lost his primary run in 2010 by something like 40 points despite having a 90+ rating from the ACU, because he told people to turn of Glenn Beck and be nicer. David Frum wrote that he opposed the Affordable Care Act, but thought that conservative policy goals might have been better achieved by talking about real-world policy matters instead of death panels. He was fired by AEI a few days later.
Rational strategic concerns along the lines you mention mandate a change in direction, or at the very least tone, for the GOP. But individuals’ motivations within the institution trump them.
It’s not like John Boehner is feeling heat from wise reformists in the House. Cantor’s attacking from the right, because that’s all that party has. That’s why Romney’s boxed in on every issue– he attacked Perry on immigration from the right, which was sound tactics in a primary, but alas for the GOP, the rest of America exists.
Anyone who says “let’s maybe not be so mean to gay people and immigrants” knows they’re likely to lose their seat/sinecure. (To say nothing of incurring the wrath of Norquist by offering logic & reason on fiscal policy).
They’re not reforming because they can’t.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
Fox News and AM talk radio = old people.
__
The institutional/professional GOP has stumbled into the bad end of a hostage taking situation, except that in this particular case I’m just fine with shooting the hostages: no negotiating with terrorists and all that, you know.
Brachiator
Fixt.
Unless you actually interview younger people, speculation, even if logical, is not much more than guesswork.
And while surveys have indicated a swing in attitudes among many groups, not just the young, with respect to gay rights, I don’t know that there is any consensus with respect to “immigrants.” And “slut shaming” is not really a category that tells you much of anything about broad issues of women’s rights.
The odd thing, the counter, is why Republicans still seem to find success at the state level, and why their repellent views are still being turned into law and policy.
Oh yeah, what portion of the total electorate is made up of younger voters?
eric
based on my non-scientific studies, i think the strident and vocal flat-out hatred of lesbians and gays did a lot of the damage. Hate is ugly. Sure, there is still a ton of bullying and hatred out there, but i think the irrationality and vitriol of the hatred toward loving gay people turned off young voters because many dont go with such hate. Mind you, i am not in the deep south, but in the midwest, and this is my sense from interacting with children and young adults.
danimal
@Suffern ACE: The GOP is going to need to change their mix of issues to compete on the national stage. I predict they will either go libertarian on the drug war, or they will go semi-isolationist on foreign policy. Either way, they’re in for some bloody infighting.
Pass the popcorn.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Culture of Truth:
__
I used to think it would be 30 years at least before the GOP started to claim that Obama was really a Republican at heart, but after watching them praise Bill Clinton during the RNC in Tampa, I think I may have to take the under on that bet.
kindness
Well I’d say it’s because the current Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the top 0.1% and what those gazillionaires want is more money. That is the only thing they care about and the only groups willing to pander to the Greedheads in order to push their agenda are the racists, the dominionists and the morans. That and the people the Greedheads hired only know to lick the boots of their bosses and agree to what ever lunacy drips from their cold, clammy lips.
So that is why as far as I’m concerned. What I don’t get is the working class white folk who are out there supporting a group that is openly contemptuous of them and has told them they are going to cut their future benefits so the Greedheads can get another fat tax cut. Are these folks so racist that they’re willing to screw themselves? Seems as such. Karl Rove laughs all the way to the bank no matter what.
JustMe
The sense I get from the Millenials is that they have our back. I like the cut of their jib.
Balconesfault
Younger voters tend to have a healthier view of science – call it the Bill Nye factor. They’ve grown up with an understanding of climate change from schools, for example – and not from Fox News and ExxonMobil funded sceptics. The GOP’s complete repudiation of science just seems weird to them … and things like the Texas GOP opposing education based on “critical thinking” just reinforces that weirdness.
Afferent Input
There is absolute truth to the idea that a person’s formative years makes a critical impact on political ideology through the rest of their lives. The baby boomers, now fast approaching 65+, lean to the GOP because of the swing to the right about 35 years ago primarily due to St. Ronnie. Thye grew up loving the Gipper, and in Gipper they trust. Nothing will change that for them. This kind of sucks for progressive politics for the next 10-15 years because olds tend to vote in large numbers.
JGabriel
DougJ: Typo, last paragraph: proper does of propaganda –> proper doses of propaganda
.
Villago Delenda Est
We paid a very high price in treasure, blood, and reputation for this electoral advantage.
Don’t fuck it up.
Culture of Truth
Just think, they could have ridden that “Democrats are elitists” wave for another 5 years if it weren’t for that damn Romney tape.
jrg
LOL. Yeah. This is just something conservatives tell themselves to feel better about the insanely stupid shit they believe.
If you think age and experience is the reason you believe Obama’s a secret Muslim Kenyan Manchurian candidate, I’ve got news… You’re still an idiot, just an elderly idiot.
Napoleon
The fact that the party someone votes for the first 2 or 3 times is pretty much who they will vote for can not be stressed enough. Think of it this way, even if after this election the voters being added split 50/50 the electorate will still trend Democratic for decades since they will be replacing what has been the strongest cohort for the Republican party in the last 30 years or so.
Villago Delenda Est
@Afferent Input:
Yet I’m in this group and I loathe Rethuglicans like I do the adherents of another ethos prevalent in Central Europe some 70 or so years back.
So generalizations are general.
SatanicPanic
That bit about people getting more conservative as they get older is just wishful thinking on the part of conservatives. It’s up there with people thinking they were somehow more hard-working or smarter because they happened to come of age during America’s peak.
Dennis SGMM
Because they’ve purged everyone with enough brains to fill a thimble?
RP
The Scorpion and the Frog
A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the
scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The
frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion
says, “Because if I do, I will die too.”
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream,
the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of
paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown,
but has just enough time to gasp “Why?”
Replies the scorpion: “Its my nature…”
Pavonis
I think the Iraq War spooked more young people than their elders are willing to admit. When you know a childhood friend or classmate who has gone off to fight in Iraq, the war becomes more personal than for more elderly voters who are usually more removed from the actual soldiers. Obama’s original momentum in the 2008 primary was largely due to Clinton’s vote in favor of the Iraq War! That’s why I supported Obama over Clinton early and urged people I knew to do the same (As for Edwards, I rightly suspected something was off about him… haircut too nice).
jibeaux
At the RNC, the Daily Show did a brief interview-ette with their Youth Outreach Coordinator.
He was 47.
He had played in a band in high school, though. In 1983 or whatever.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Try to answer these two questions with the same answer:
1. Why did so many of the young in the 80s become Republicans?
2. Why are so many of the young today becoming Democrats?
I think the answer is that when young people start paying attention to the world, and realize things are messed up, they blame those in power. For most of the people you are talking about, when they started paying attention in the world, the Republicans were and have been in power, and trying to hold onto it by any means necessary.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Villago Delenda Est: So generalizations are general.
Yup.
Though that won’t stop a discussion from spinning up about how Gen X is a bunch of me-first slackers.
WJS
Information.
Younger voters are now better informed than they were in decades past because of things like, but not necessarily limited to, The Daily Show, blogs and social media. People are more connected to their peer group, and with that comes an improvement in how they are informed about what is going on.
You would think, with high unemployment and with many young people living back at home after college, that the Republicans would be exploiting this. But the three things DougJ indicated are all major negatives, especially slut shaming, which is demographic suicide and which is probably helping the Libertarians a lot this year.
CELL PHONE ONLY individuals are also now being polled much better. In years past, the number of people whose only “telephone” was a cell phone were somewhat underrepresented in polling. Now, they’re getting closer and closer to being represented in an accurate way (depending on the polling outfit, of course).
This is what’s killing the GOP. Polls are improving, information is expanding, and people are seeing the issues more clearly. This means they are voting Democrat, even if they have to hold their nose and be slightly less of a purity troll than Conor Friersdorf.
Villago Delenda Est
@jrg:
This.
Modern “conservatives” are NOT conservative. They are nihilists, at heart. You can’t be conservative and embrace the theoretical chaos of the “free market” at the same time. This is one of the cognitive dissonance bombs that infest the fundies. They say they love Jesus, but they love Mammon so much more, to the extent where they now call Mammon Jesus.
If it wasn’t for the First Amendment, these idiots would all be burnt at the stake for heresy.
? Martin
I think your latter point there is correct.
As to why they haven’t tried to change the message – they can’t. The social issues are a distraction from the economic ones. Go back and read the transcript from Obama’s ‘cling to guns and religion’ talk. He’s telling his supporters to not give up on republicans that focus on those issues – because they’ve been abandoned by the nations economic policies and they turn to social ones and he’s telling his supporters to go back and take a run at those economic issues again and point out what Democratic policies can offer them.
So the problem the right has is that once you drop those social issues, all you wind up with are policies that work for the 1% at the expense of the 99%. As soon as they change their message, their support collapses. They need to do it, but it comes with some serious costs:
1) They’re going to lose every election for a generation. The Dems aren’t giving the GOP any big openings to exploit to win voters back over. They’ve been good about covering left and center issues just well enough to that the GOP can’t stake any ground of their own. The Dems aren’t great on many of these things, but they don’t need to be for this purpose. The GOP can’t do terribly much more than just agree with the Dems. So long as the Dems aren’t going after guns and really stretching into areas where the GOP can draw distinctions, the GOP is neutralized from a policy perspective. They could come out hard against drones or defense spending or in favor of legalizing pot or something like that – but those are going to be really hard sells.
2) In order to back off social issues, they need to adopt popular economic issues. They don’t really have anything that’s popular other than ‘don’t help black people’. In order to build a popular economic platform, they’re going to have to cut loose their big money people – and that’s really all they have. There’s very little small donor support for the GOP, and there’s very little genuine grass roots support for the GOP – people that will knock doors, etc.
3) In order to push any agenda forward, you need people that can champion it – and thanks to Citizens United, most of the GOP are bought and paid for. There’s just nobody to champion anything like this. Guys like McCain will be gone. Guys like Graham and Coburn are already earning RINO titles for speaking out to the small degree that they are. They’re going to be primary targets before this lesson is learned. In a few elections, everyone will look like or be to the right of DeMint.
With no Tea Party, I think they might be able to do it, but anyone in the GOP that might have had a fighting chance to pull it off got primaries out by a teatard. They ran Specter out of the party. They defeated Castle in DE. Lugar was primaries out. Bennett was primaries out. Hatch was nearly primaries out. Seriously – who is going to stand up and steer the ship back away from these insane issues?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Brachiator:
They’ve spent 30+ years developing state machines. Dems have not, at least not in any systematic fashion. That’s why when Dean starting on his 50 State Strategy, I was excited since I hoped that meant the Democratic Party was finally gonna battle the Repups at the local level, state-by-state. Alas, that’s not happened.
For example, here in Misery, statewide Dem candidates are still pretty insular from others, there’s a huge vertical structure, zero-sum-game-in-terms-of-friendly-support mindset not helped by a moribund state party. It’s why the Repups clean our clocks at the state level.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Pavonis: When you know a childhood friend or classmate who has gone off to fight in Iraq, the war becomes more personal
Yes. There’s this, and I bet the “with us or agin’ us” terra-lert crude shouty propaganda propping the war up scared a lot of the youngsters shitless (like it did for me.)
DougJ
@JGabriel:
Thanks.
Dennis SGMM
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Or how it’s all the Boomers’ fault. Generalizations like the ones mentioned are for lazy minds.
WereBear
What do they have for younger voters?
They want banks to rip them off for college loans. They like the businesses taking jobs overseas. They are against sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
The scared religious youth vote R. That’s about it.
catclub
@danimal: “I predict they will either go libertarian on the drug war, or they will go semi-isolationist on foreign policy.”
Interesting choices. I just cannot see the first one.
It would involve de-incarcerating a LOT of black people.
Plus killing the private prison business. And third, the democrats would be happy to follow.
The Foreign policy one seems more likely, as long as there is a clause that Israel is the 51st state, so anything related to it is not isolationist.
Anyway, I am glad it is not my problem to figure out how the party of the rich and greedy can appeal to more young people.
It is also interesting that other nations have Christian Democrats parties, (and they are usually the conservative party) but we do not.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SatanicPanic:
__
People become more risk-adverse as they get older, not more conservative. The idea that risk-adverse = conservative dates back to a bygone era when the people who wanted to gamble on a better future for humanity by trying various utopian schemes were mostly on the Left. Not today. Today the radical utopian social engineers who want to destroy the ancien regime and rebuild their idea of paradise on the ashes of the old society are on the Right. Fuck em. Homo Sapiens Ideologicus delende est.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dennis SGMM:
Hey! You! MSM talking heads! We’re talking about you, motherfuckers!
Afferent Input
@Villago Delenda Est: Obviously Ronaldus Maximus did not get 100% of the vote. In fact, there was a core group of folks during that time that became politically engaged simply in a reaction against Reganism. And so certainly for those folks that formed their political beliefs in that context, they do not track with the majority of their generation.
DougJ
Is anyone getting this post title? I was very happy with it.
quannlace
But…but…don’t you know the polls are SKEWED!
reflectionephemeral
@DougJ: Nope, I’m not; it’s not “Watch Your Step”, which is what the title put into my head & won’t go away, so I think I’m out for this round of Name That Lyric.
flukebucket
How is Obama polling with voters between the ages of 45-55? I know that information is out there somewhere but I just don’t have time right now to find it and really want to know.
Brachiator
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Fox News definitely, AM talk radio, I don’t know.
I do a ton of commuting much of the year and can’t listen to hard core political talk radio. Much NPR is predictable and boring. So that leaves sports talk radio and a lot of podcasts.
And with all noted cautions about how representative talk radio might be, in LA (probably the largest drive time market), there are a considerable number of youngish callers to these programs.
Worse, I hear a lot of uninformed Obama and Democrat bashing from both hosts and younger callers on sports talk radio shows. I say worse, because some of these people appear to have been screwed over by GOP policies and yet are blind to the contradiction of the fact of their lives vs their Obama hate.
Also, I find the core of angry anti-government semi-libertarians among younger tech people to be very interesting. And a lot of these people have influence greater than their numbers.
ruemara
The older I get, the more radical I get.
JGabriel
__
__
Pavonis:
My first overtly and unambiguous political memory is watching Richard Nixon resign. That’s followed by memories of inflation and gas lines under Ford — I don’t know how popular memory assigned the blame to Carter. And of course, there were the body bags of Vietnam, and the pervasive culture of corruption that extended from Nixon to Agnew, Mitchell, Colson, Haldemman, et. al.
So I guess I was already an incipient Democrat before I started watching MASH and Lou Grant. Then in my mid-teens I got into GB Shaw the way others get attached to Ayn Rand, thereby sealing the progression of my sociaIist leanings.
Fortunately, Shaw was also a much, much better writer and stylist — so I didn’t learn any bad writing or logic habits from him the way Objectivists do from Rand.
In any case, yes, it goes back to those formative years, growing up under the consequences of GOP leadership with Nixon & Agnew & Ford. The thing I’ve never understood is why the majority of my age cohort, by a moderate margin, ended up as Reagan supporters. Didn’t they grow up with the same formative experiences?
.
Villago Delenda Est
@Afferent Input:
I was born in 1957. My first Presidential election was in 1976.
My attitudes were formed before Reagan assumed office. Watergate was probably where I turned, forever, against the Rethugs.
Perhaps those born 10-15 years after me were influenced by Reagan, but I don’t think boomers in general were. If they were, it was because the became more risk-adverse as they married and had kids…I know some of my contemporaries raised hell in the early 80’s, got married, had kids, and suddenly got VERY risk adverse.
Tonybrown74
It’s all about that MBA thinking. Immediate “profits” and no long term planning.
What can “we” (do to get votes now. Forget about the next election, much less for future GOP membership.
Ken
“I know PEOPLE GET MORE CONSERVATIVE AS THEY GET OLDER”
Interestng; As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become much, much more liberal.
MikeJ
@DougJ: Everything seems to be up in the air at this time.
ant
I like to google brown vs board of education, look at the year that case was decided, get out my calculator, and try to figure out the age of the folks who didn’t see any skin pigment whilst in elementary/high school.
Also too also, 18-30 year olds are 2nd generation folks removed from segregated schools now also.
Too. Also.
ding dong
@danimal: they cannot go libertarian on the drug war because that releases a whole lot of minorities to vote and it will take the repubs fifty years to get a third of the black vote and that’s if they do everything right. The dems will screw up something foreign policy related that will result in repubs winning.
blingee
Nobody gives a shit about the young voters because they generally don’t give a shit about politics so their turn out is pretty dismal compared to people say 40+.
As a result young people get the politicians they deserve. Always has been that way and it won’t change.
Bokonon
And … that is why the GOP is trying as hard as it can to mess with the voter registrations of college students and young adults.
For example: the Colorado Secretary of State’s office just revealed that the mobile phone app that they have been publicizing, as a way for people to register to vote? It hasn’t been working. Upwards of 800 registrations have disappeared without a trace (and … with no notice to the poor dupes who thought they were registering).
The Colorado Secretary of State will do their usual “oopsie!” thing, and plead incompetence instead of sabotage. Of course. They always have that cover. They’ve used it before (like, when it was discovered that their “voter fraud” claims were based on bogus data). But which age group would use iPhones and stuff to try and register?
But connect the dots, folks. This is all being done in deadly earnest, as far under the radar as the GOP can get. A thousand votes here and there adds up to a contested election.
Culture of Truth
The GOP fell in love with how crazy ideas and said “put us in charge!” “put us in charge!”
We put them in charge. They presided over an attack, lied the nation into a war, destroyed a city, wrecked all three wars they started, and created an economic catastrophe. So how do you sell your product after that? Divide and conquer. Go after minorities, gays, immigrats, muslims, and women, obviously. But when you add all those together, plus, soldiers, college grads, and white men with common sense, it’s kind of a lot of people.
the Conster
The media gatekeepers that we olds grew up with are irrelevant, and the kids have grown up with Stewart and Colbert interpreting events for them. Republicans are ridiculous looking, sounding, and their policies are hateful. Pointing and laughing is a pretty powerful disincentive to recruitment.
? Martin
@Afferent Input:
That’s a thin explanation, I think. My parents are both right about 65. They both dealt with Vietnam first hand, and everything that went on around it – drug use, war protests, counterculture, etc. And right smack dab in the middle of all of this was Nixon. The big upheaval for that generation was that government legitimately could not be trusted. They were lying about the war. They were lying about Watergate and abusing power. Their economic policies were terrible – regulation designed to protect unions, wage fixing, and so on. Things didn’t improve with oil embargoes and whatnot.
Reagan came along and told them an honest truth: these guys are fucking up and you don’t need to trust them. Let’s be honest here – government was fucking up pretty bad from the mid 60s to the mid 70s. Carter was actually doing a good job of trying to unravel it, but that was against a backdrop of hostages, waiting in line for gas, and a nuclear power plant crisis.
I can’t fault them too much for becoming cynical with all of that going on – and even though Nixon was a Republican, it was Reagan who told them it was okay to feel that way. We’ve become every bit as cynical over Iraq and tax cuts and whatnot – but ours is directed at a party, not at government itself. I don’t think conservatives love Republicans much more than they do Democrats, I think they just trust Republicans to get the fuck out of the way more than Democrats because that’s what Ronnie promised. I don’t agree with that assessment, but I do understand why they hold it.
SatanicPanic
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: That’s a good point. One event I see no one has brought up was the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember seeing that on TV as a kid and being like “why are they interrupting my cartoons for this” but my parents were deeply affected. I would guess that not having a Utopian leftist alternative out there has really focused young people on making things better right now, instead of having pie-in-the-sky dreams like the right still does.
Palli
@Villago Delenda Est: Please don’t
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Brachiator:
You make some very good points.
I don’t trust political talk radio callers as a representative sample of their listener demographics because of their call-screening practices, but sports talk radio is probably a better sample with less screening. My knee-jerk association of talk radio with older people is based not on sampling callers, but on who I hear citing “things they heard on the radio” in face-to-face conversation. But this too may not be very representative of the actual demographics.
blingee
@Ken: I really don’t know where this bullshit comes from that people get more conservative. Perhaps in the literal definition of the word but it does not mean people lean more towards the party that calls itself the conservative party. There is NOTHING ‘conservative’ about todays GOP. Mostly made up of extreme hypocrits as far as I can tell.
Palli
Mean people are mean people at any age.
JGabriel
__
__
blingee:
I think this sentiment is belied by GOP efforts to keep college-age citizens from voting through laws that delegitimize college ID as acceptable proof of identification at the ballot box.
After all, you don’t make the effort to block the vote of people whose votes you don’t think will change the outcome anyway.
.
? Martin
@ruemara: That’s whats happening with my dad. My mom gets ever more teatard, but I keep expecting my dad to arrive on his visits in a Che beret on. Why they divorced gets more clear with each passing year.
SatanicPanic
@blingee: You’re missing the point though. Young people who don’t vote now will still, presumably, have a party identification 10-20 years down the road when they do start voting.
Woodrowfan
Alas, I remember much the same conversation in 1968-1972, about how the Republicans had so turned off young voters that the Democrats would have an electoral advantage. I see an awful lot of young folks who may think rascism and sexism and homophobia are dumb, but still like the Randian “free market”
TooManyJens
@Ken:
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten somewhat more liberal but much more pragmatic. Some would consider that a contradiction, but I obviously don’t agree.
Violet
@ruemara:
Me too. I’m a raging leftist now in comparison to when I was younger. I just don’t fucking care what anyone thinks anymore. The GOP is batshit crazy and I refuse to be silent and let them destroy our country.
nastybrutishntall
Ah, yes, the Sign of the Beast again. This election is getting positively mystical, I tell you!
cosima
I was probably late to growing up, didn’t really happen until my 30s, that said, the GW Bush years scared me away from the Republican party. I would say that we’ve become far more liberal as we’ve gotten older, because we had those tendencies already. Those on the other side of the political aisle had conservative tendencies, and those have become more entrenched. I don’t meet many people that had radical conversions, politically, like, say, John Cole. It could be that I don’t get out enough, though.
Our oldest will be 22 in October, our youngest is 7. Two things that I took for granted — and that were somewhat key to my having a good quality of life, given that I was not about to give up sex — were access to birth control & abortion if I needed &/or wanted them. It infuriates me (not sure what makes it thru the filter here, so I’ll keep it clean) that the GOP wants to dictate those issues in regard to my daughters. My husband will never vote for a Republican again until they stop with that shite, and he was one who bought in to every b.s. Repub talking point about business/economy/patriotism.
In 2008 I could maintain my friendships with my Republican-voting girlfriends, most of them loved Bible Spice (because they were delusional and there was still a bit of a facade in place with regard to her), loved the Bible, their guns, whatever. This year I have drawn a hard line on that, I cannot and will not be friends with someone who believes that they have the right to tell my daughters (or me) what they (I) can or cannot do with their (my) reproductive systems. And the thought that they believe that anyone, particularly a child, should have the baby of her rapist is disgusting beyond words.
They can just keep doubling down on that stuff, because youth notice it — not many youngsters desperate to become parents at the age of 16, but plenty of them wanting to get laid.
War resonates with youth, too, but with young women, based on my own discussions, it’s the birth control/abortion issue as much as anything else.
gene108
Republican messaging relies heavily on Fox News and other established media surrogates.
Even if younger people are tuning these things out directly, they filter into the talking points of the day on the internets.
Your only going to see change, if you can start swinging voters in the current red states.
Look at the electoral map from Clinton’s win in 1992.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992
He won Arkansas, Louisiana and other states that are now solidly Republican.
DougJ
@MikeJ:
Great song, right?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@? Martin:
__
There’s an issue that I think a lot of older liberals like to ignore and younger liberals simply aren’t aware of, which is that in the lifetime of us oldsters there has been a catastrophic decline in the amount of trust that Americans have in the government to be both honest and competent. And the person who really started us down that slippery slope to Reaganite ideology was Lyndon Johnson. He and his people lied about Vietnam and fucked up everything they touched when it came to that war. If it weren’t for that, Watergate would have destroyed trust in the Republican Party rather than trust in the government more generally. The problems that Carter struggled against are the other piece of bread on that shit sandwich.
A nation in which people really don’t trust the govt to speak honestly about our problems or to not fuck it up when trying to solve them is fundamentally hostile to liberalism, because liberalism proposes to use the govt as a tool to make the lives of ordinary people better. We’ve been fighting an uphill battle ever since LBJ on this score, and part of Obama’s task is to change the cultural landscape by rebuilding our trust in the government again. In that sense he is the anti-LBJ, reversing the self-inflicted damage that has been haunting the Democratic party since the mid 1960s.
Incidentally, this is a driving force behind the GOP’s constant screaming about fake scandals and sabotage and obstruction during the Obama administration. It isn’t just about political power and advantage now, they are fighting a long term cultural war against the very idea of a trustworthy and competent govt.
shoutingattherain
The promise of unlimited free sex. And weed. You didn’t get the invite?
But seriously, Democrats and Liberals are just cooler than Republicans for younger people. Obama is a cool guy. Mitt Romney is sooo not.
NonyNony
@Violet:
Note the phrasing that you use here. That’s the nub of the whole “get more conservative as you get older” trope. As we get older, we get more invested in the status quo, and the idea of actively working for radical changes to the status quo becomes less attractive. That isn’t the same as saying we resist all change – change for improvement at the margins is good, radically tearing down the system and replacing it with something new, not so much.
And that’s part of why Republicans can’t expect to see much growth in the near term from younger people growing up and getting more “conservative”. Because Republicans now are radicals and all of the “True Conservatives” are center-left Democrats.
? Martin
@JGabriel:
They repeated again in 1979 under Carter. And by then, we had already implemented a ton of energy policies, the strategic reserves, and so on to combat it repeating, and yet it repeated. At least in 1973 you could buy a car with a bit of pickup, by 1979 even the Corvette was barely pushing 180hp and lots of cars were well under 100hp, so not only did you have to suffer with shitty cars, you had to wait in long lines to put gas in your shitty cars. And sweaters. And hostages. And TMI. It was kind of a perfect storm of ‘Man, do we suck. Wait, who’s the president again?’
waratah
@DougJ: No, but I am sure it is clever.
Another Halocene Human
Ding ding ding. Research by evangelical Christians as to why young people were leaving (they’re always leaving, but it’s really bad) gave the #1 reason as “church people”. Hatred towards gays was another big factor. The generation raised up in the church (evangelicals for decades relied on adult converts, which are another crowd entirely) saw that it was human, too, and walked away.
You forgot the military. For years after Vietnam ended you had military who never saw combat. The young generation has. In fact, they are much more intimately acquainted with the horrors of war and the indifference towards wounded soldiers of the chickhawk warmongerers than most of the country.
And of course media–it’s very well documented that tv viewership is down, led by plummeting numbers in “the demo” who play video games for entertainment and get their news off internet aggregators. The dirty secret about tv news, cable and otherwise, is that, like the newspapers, they have an aging audience and seem unable to attract younger viewers.
(Except for MHP. She’s awesome. And on the web. I don’t do cable.)
Yutsano
@JGabriel: It’s Durf. That should tell you the astuteness of the politics right there.
? Martin
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I think you’re dead on. Thankfully, I don’t think young people are buying it.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Afferent Input: That would be me. I wasn’t old enough to vote in 1980, but I was (barely) in 1984. Reagan scared the shit out of me. An obviously mentally out-of-it rageaholic, being openly manipulated by his ambitious, spiteful hate harpy of a wife and the puppetmaster James Baker, a man who seemed to want nothing more than to have the entire planet die in a holocaust of nuclear fire, just so long as it killed all the young folks and commies.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@? Martin:
__
So why didn’t Reagan get blamed for the AIDs epidemic then? I vividly remember how unfair it seemed in the early 1980s to finally be old enough to have sex (this after listening to kids a few years older than me going on and on and on, ad nauseum, about sex, drugs and rock-n-roll as if it was a fucking birthright) and then to wake up one fine morning to find out that it could kill you dead, just like that. Talk about a buzzkill.
Another Halocene Human
@Brachiator: The odd thing, the counter, is why Republicans still seem to find success at the state level, and why their repellent views are still being turned into law and policy.
Oh yeah, what portion of the total electorate is made up of younger voters?
Well that was a softball. Younger voters are often not well informed about local elections. They either vote with their parents or skip down-ticket races because they’ve just moved out of their home area and don’t know anyone.
Few people running for office bother to reach out to young people. No wonder Ron Paul was so popular in 2008. (And so many naively worked for him.) It’s a small constituency that is considered a waste of time. When I had just moved to Virginia after leaving my home state I skipped a lot of downticket races b/c I had no idea who the people running were, except for one libertarian who put up signs that said “Support the Bill of Rights and Legalize Marijuana”. Oh fuck yeah. (He lost by big numbers, but it was fun to thumb my nose at the stuffed shirts. 30% voted for pot-man, ha ha!)
Otherwise, I felt irresponsible voting for I-know-not-what. I’m getting to be a straight-ticket Dem sort but that wasn’t true back then because I came from Mass and Dems varied from Bulger and Coakley to Harshbarger and Kennedy. And I refused to be one of those “vote for the Irish name” sorts.
fuzz
I’m 27 and what made me vote Democrat and turned me liberal was Iraq during the election of 04. You had a war going so poorly that entire cities and provinces were essentially off limits to US troops, and yet all the Republicans were celebrating, bashing actual veterans and generally just being either very naive or very cowardly (a lot of kids at my college were supporting the war and yet despite being 19 and healthy had no interest at all in fighting it or even joining ROTC and fighting it later on).
Pavonis
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
For the Millennial Generation it often seems that drugs and rock-n-roll are things that our parents are more into. OTOH, sex never goes out of fashion.
TooManyJens
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Because there were easy scapegoat groups to blame AIDS on. People were much more comfortable blaming gay men and drug users (two groups most people weren’t in, after all), than Mr. Happy Sunshine Morning in America (who most people voted for).
Culture of Truth
Carter got blamed in some ways because Dems are they party of government.
The GOP is the party of business. The 2008 Crash was a capitalism Vietnam. Republicans cannot walk away and blame Obama as easily as they would like to think.
J. Michael Neal
@JGabriel: No, they’d do it anyway even without worrying about this year’s election. Just as party ID when young is a useful predictor for which way someone votes in later years, voting at an early age is a useful predictor of turnout at a later age. Obviously it’s not the only predictor since turnout goes up, but it’s still useful.
If the GOP sees that it’s getting killed in the young demographic and knows that it’s going to keep getting killed in that cohort for decades to come, it’s useful to them to do what they can to lower the rate at which that cohort turns out for those same decades.
Pavonis
@fuzz: Gah, the College Republicans and their pro-war parades on campus during the Iraq War were sickening. Reading the biographies of leading Republican men like Bush and Romney reveals that they too belonged to this species of chickenhawk during their college years.
sublime33
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I was in college in the late 70’s, and Carter was viewed as a loser/milquetoast. The Reagan worship got seeded from the anti-Carter feelings and Reagan enjoyed a bandwagon effect that Republicans enjoyed for the next 25 years. The Bush/Obama transition has a lot of similarities.
FormerSwingVoter
The Internet. The Internet changed everything.
When a politician says a thing, you can do a Google search and see if it’s true. Also, communicating with other people who may not be from your economic station or geographic area makes it harder to accept their demonization as fact.
This is what caused the massive shift.
Another Halocene Human
@danimal: Which sounds great until you realize it’s a Ron Paul cum Pat Buchanan mashup of white supremacist ideas. (Drug policy started as a white supremacist thing, of course, but too many white kids are getting nailed for using weed and coke and pills now.) And what’s awesome is that they can pretend, Romney-style, to have empathy for brown people.
I think the Dems are worried about their own conservative flank on pot but we haven’t seen the violent backlash towards gradual state by state decriminalization like we had with SSM, mainly because RWHGs don’t have a history of fundraising on pot-scares and I guess Big Tobaccy missed the boat.
AxelFoley
@Suffern ACE:
Dick Cheney on same sex marriage.
Brachiator
@NonyNony:
At a certain age when you get older, you are the status quo, unless you have dropped out of society.
The most hopeful part of the 60s and other eras was the idea that we could make the society better.
Sadly, some of my conservative co-workers, who otherwise are pretty good people, are stuck on the notion that somehow they are the only ones who have ever worked for anything, and that the Democrats are using government to take away all their “stuff” and give it to the less deserving.
And note that this is not just selfishness; it is fear. A fear that they may lose their jobs and homes and fall out of the middle class. A fear that the GOP has been very good at exploiting.
Another Halocene Human
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: But Obama IS a Republican, just the kind that would be called a RINO and primaried out of the party… cf. Huntsman, Jon.
I am kidding of course… the only thing the GOP has akin to community activism is building megachurches. All the Republicans who espoused views like Obama’s were blue bloods or pretended to be.
That’s why GOP crazies fundamentally don’t GET how Obama connects to voters.
Remember 2008… Obama as Svengali? They. don’t. get. it.
Quincy
Iraq, gay rights and extremism on women’s issues are the big three. What’s disheartening is that the younger generation is still overly receptive to the GOP’s anti-tax, I’ve got mine economic outlook. Of course, that’s easy to understand given that the Democrats they’ve grown up with over the past 20 years haven’t really presented an alternative economic philosophy. Occupy and the ongoing problems many are having with student loans and graduating into a recession have started to change that somewhat, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. There’s an emerging Democratic majority alright, but we should be worried about whether it tilts toward the DLC wing of the party.
J. Michael Neal
@Woodrowfan:
There’s a major difference. In the period you mention, people *talked* about how the Republicans had completely turned off young voters, but there is very little evidence that they really had done so. They had clearly turned off a very visible portion of young adults and that led to the popular perception, but that involved ignoring the political opinions of a lot of less visible members of the same age cohort.
This time, it definitely appears to be the cohort as a whole that is turned off, not just the more politically radical segment of college students.
AxelFoley
@kindness:
Yes, and it’s been that way for a few centuries now.
nastybrutishntall
Once the GOP is put out of its misery, whatever replaces it is likely to be Libertarian. There are tons of young, vocal libertarians aching to vote for a candidate with an actual chance of winning. It’s inevitable, since even as social mores change and become more “liberal” (respecting civil rights and liberties, ending the drug war, protecting reproductive rights, and resisting religious overreach), it stems from an individualistic, atomised, “internutty” consciousness in which “you do your shit, I do mine, and we’re cool. But just don’t mess with my shit.” So we’ll also see economic ideas in young people move away from liberalism towards “self-sufficiency” and “less government”, since that appeals to the idea that everyone leaves each other alone rather than being forced to provide aid and a safety net for each other. And this will draw a lot of the richer Dems away from the Dem party, and will likely leave the Dem party somewhat weakened as it becomes stigmatized even more as the party of the poor.
Gravie
I, too, have gotten more liberal as I’ve gotten older, but also less idealistic. The world is as it is and no amount of “oughta be” will change that. I’m an older boomer — born in 1948 — and my friends in that cohort are increasingly polarized left-right. (Of course, being my friends, more of them are left than right but the ones who are right are farther to the right than they used to be.) So I found this information from the Pew Research Center interesting:
flukebucket
@DougJ:
Talking Heads?
Gravie
The block quote thingy didn’t work correctly — it’s supposed to be at the end of the entire post instead of where it is. Oh well.
Pavonis
@nastybrutishntall: In the long term, I think the parties might readjust into a social conservative/ economically liberal party which caters to minorities and poorer whites and a libertarian party for the better-off. In the very long term, the former will evolve into a bio-conservative party while the latter will support transhumanism. This will happen as new genetic engineering and cybernetic technologies give those in the elite new ways to gain an edge.
Joel
One thing that people are overlooking is climate change. Many younger people recognize that they’re inheriting a giant turd in the form of anthropogenic climate change. And they also recognize that previous generations knew about this problem and did nothing about it, largely due to republican obstructionism.
nastybrutishntall
@Pavonis: I like the cut of your jib.
Turgidson
I think this is probably still true with respect to money and fiscal matters. The problem is, of course, that the Republicans’ views on these issues are batshit insane no matter how old you are – heck, no matter how wealthy you are up to a point, too. Back when the GOP wasn’t so open about their burning desire to destory SS, Medicare, and Medicaid and were also a little less openly regressive, at least on the national level, on social issues, it made some sense for middle-aged people and older who were at the peak of their earning years or nearing retirement to vote for the party that promised to cut their taxes.
So I think people do get more conservative as they age. But in the current political alignment these people have no business leaving the Democratic fold unless they’re really fucking rich or really fucking bigoted.
Brachiator
@Another Halocene Human:
RE: The odd thing, the counter, is why Republicans still seem to find success at the state level, and why their repellent views are still being turned into law and policy. Oh yeah, what portion of the total electorate is made up of younger voters?
Doesn’t really answer my question.
When I was younger, it wasn’t that I wasn’t well informed about local elections. It’s that for a time, I just didn’t give a shit, unless prodded. Some friends got involved because of a women they had the hots for (as good a reason as any).
But again, instead of folks guessing about what makes “the yoot” tick, there should be ya know, interviews, journalism, etc.
Also, I wonder how social media affects younger voters, keeping them informed, and helping out in the situation you note in which they move and supposedly don’t know anyone.
Interesting point. What about Rock the Vote? etc. However, there has been a big decline in organizations like the League of Women Voters. There may be a decline in youth focused organizations as well.
And maybe Ron Paul gets some traction because some of his positions, no war and all the drugs you want, have youth appeal. Other policies may not resonate because they seem abstract. Again, the question is what younger voters are thinking and worrying about.
Another Halocene Human
@? Martin: Govt in the 60s and 70s did not fuck up to any extent the way the govt fucked up in the 2000s, with Greenspan’s loose money policy, completely roached industrial policy, and plummeting real wages for households.
The 70s were kinda bad for pensioners, but not terrible; the oil shocks sucked but Carter was actually trying to do something about that (what a novel concept), and then there was Vietnam. Which Johnson took a lot of the blame for.
Union fixing? Until Reagan, workers as an aggregate shared in the gains of productivity. There was talk in the 70s about what people would do with all this new leisure time they were going to have. Laughable today.
I think Reagan, if you listen to his rhetoric, had a lot more to do with the fact that the 1970s was the era in which African-American households made the greatest economic gains in American history. Those scary black urban blackity black blacks were gettin’ some and Archer Bunker was gettin’ a headache.
Another Halocene Human
@Another Halocene Human: Jim Crow (1890s) was a backlash against rising Black prosperity, also, too.
Linda
Why are young’uns more Democratic? It’s easy. If they came of age during the last 10 years, they can’t remember a competent Republican president. In fact, anyone who can’t remember the 80s can’t remember a Republican president who had any stature in the public minds.
The Republicans remind me of trained horses who can “count” with hoof taps. They know how to do their schtick, but not anything else, and are lost if they are asked another question. But it always got me a lump of sugar before! It’s why they keep pushing the “Jimmy Carter”/Obama analogy on people who were born after Carter’s presidency.
? Martin
@Turgidson:
I think it depends on where you start. If you start out conservative and find yourself doing okay, you get less restrained on those things. I certainly have – I’m no longer worried about putting the kids through college, for instance, but my wife and I started out each working and we lived off of less than one paycheck and banked all the rest. We’re reaping those rewards now, but when we were younger, all of our friends were doing fun things and owning nice cars. Now the tables have turned.
But most people start out spending most of what they earn and have to become more restrained as they go along as they realize they aren’t set up to handle college or retirement or whatever, and so the ‘run the country like you do your checkbook’ message becomes more effective.
different-church-lady
Jeez, Doug, it’s ridiculously simple: they hate gays, they hate immigrants and they… okay, actually they’re probably kind of conflicted about sluts. But the point is that the modern GOP is now All Id, All the Time, and it has been from the moment Palin let the dogs out. They are no longer capable of making political calculations, they are only capable of expressing the sad effects of their inner demons. I’m not even sure winning elections matters to them anymore.
And you know, I hadn’t even realized it until this moment: they don’t want to court the young because they hate the young too.
Another Halocene Human
@Brachiator: Rock the Vote has been around for a while, through many Republican victories. I’ve never seen Rock the Vote canvass for downticket races, so–what was your point, exactly?
Gus diZerega
@Villago Delenda Est:
Your nihilism charge is a very good call. The party of ‘values’ is proving itself to believe in no values at all save power and domination.
JGabriel
@Afferent Input:
Grew up? The youngest boomers are a year or two older than me. They were 16 when Reagan was elected, while the oldest boomers were about 35. Most of the boomers were already grown up by the time Reagan became president.
I think the older half of the boomers grew up under Eisenhower, and became Republican due to their memories of a growing post-war economy. Not because of Reagan.
.
Gus diZerega
@nastybrutishntall: Depends on how well they outgrow reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. As a one time libertarian, I think I can safely say that to a large degree libertarianism has degenerated into little more than an apology for egoism while stoned. It cannot handle nature intelligently nor can it deal with the complexities of a civilization getting ever more closely linked.
gene108
@Another Halocene Human:
The U.S. population isn’t evenly distributed across 50 states.
At the presidential level you essentially have 50 state elections for the candidate to win.
What I would like to find out is what percentage of youth favor Democrats more than Republicans in each state. I don’t have time at work to do this, but essentially is the demographic shift uniform or is it confined mostly to the more populous coastal states.
If you have the current crop of red states having youngsters about as conservative as their folks, it won’t be enough to force Republicans to change, because they’ll always have enough of a base in presidential elections – 20 or so states – to think they just need to tilt a few swing states their way to win.
We really need a Reagan/Carter, Reagan/Mondale, GHWB/Dukakis style drubbing of a Republican Presidential candidate to effect change, but as long as they are safe in 20 or so states, I don’t see it happening.
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
One reason the right-wingers went so hard after President Clinton was because he could’ve won back a lot of the Reagan Democrats, if he could make it through a full term without much scandal, since both Nixon, Reagan and Bush, Sr. had administrations with varying degrees of lawlessness.
The right-wing media and a lazy/innocent* MSM just kept pushing out right-wing talking points in the early 1990’s about things like Whitewater, his $400 runway haircut, etc. that really hurt President Clinton.
*I think they figured all news papers and magazines – Washington Times, American Spectator, etc. – must be neutral objective reporters like they are. I don’t think they had a clue that they were being played for political ends.
? Martin
@Another Halocene Human: I disagree. A lot of the economic expansion in the 80s and 90s was due to the massive deregulation of transportation that started in the 70s. Not just air, but ports, rail, and highway shipping routes. This seriously opened up intermodal transport in the US. FedEx never could have succeeded without the airline deregulation in the late 70s, and there was wave after wave of that kind of deregulation through the 80s. That benefitted not just the transportation sector, but businesses all around the country. It had downsides – trade was cheaper, so manufacturing could more easily be offshored, and cross-country shipping was cheaper so local and regional businesses got wound up into national ones. Until the 70s, NYC was a major manufacturing center, and that all moved out because transportation allowed it to, and finance increasingly moved in, but that one area of protective regulation was a pretty massive drag on economic growth nationally.
And it doesn’t matter who the source of Vietnam was, it was government that fucked it up – and it was every bit as bad as Iraq – both in economic and human costs. And yes, Carter was doing something positive about energy, but events conspired in such a way that the country never saw the benefits. That was out of his control, but the damage was done – we made all of these sacrifices and got no apparent results, and so you can’t blame people for seeing it as a failure.
There were a ton of other things going on there, but there’s a lot that government was doing through the 70s that was just plain bad policy. The cost of Vietnam was just as damaging to economic policy (leading to the fairly sudden collapse of Bretton Woods, price and wage controls, then inflation, then unemployment) as many of Bush’s policies were to the 2008 market collapse and our current unemployment problem because he ran the deficit up so high that we don’t feel we can do stimulus spending.
Arclite
As Sully is so fond of pointing out, it took the Tories getting crushed three times in a row before they changed. If the Dems held both the presidency and the congress for 12 years, you’d see the Repubs change, but not before that I think. As long as they’re able to win (by hook or by crook I might add) then you’ll see them clinging to their insane worldview.
ThresherK
@JustMe: “Cut of their jib” is extra funny, if unintentional, given the GOP’s nominee this time around.
Tangent: Does anyone else think Romney should not camapaing in that red windbreaker that makes him look like he stepped off an America’s Cup yacht?
Djur
@Brachiator: As a certified Young Person who votes, I can say that Rock The Vote is goofy as fuck and nobody gives a shit. Nonvoters always have reasons for not voting, and they’re not going to be convinced by Puff Daddy or whoever.
Brachiator
@Another Halocene Human:
I never claimed that Rock the Vote was particularly successful. There’s also the question of whether any program could much appeal to younger voters, especially those who may be politically aware but still largely indifferent to political participation.
My point is, and remains, very simple. Everybody here, including me, has opinions about why the yoots don’t vote. We’ve even got fun anecdotes about our own young lives. Opinions ain’t research or reporting. None of the “answers” here amount to much.
What else you got?
Djur
Oh, and I was a young leftist before W. was elected. Growing up with yellow-dog Clintonite Democrats in a very liberal city, the only radicalism available that didn’t turn my stomach was to the left.
What 8 years of W. and 4 years of teabag insanity have done is stamp out the purity pony inside me. I’m still solidly to the left of any elected Democrat, but I’d crawl over broken glass to vote the Democratic ticket if there’s any chance a Republican might get in office, and I’ll do that for the rest of my life barring a ’60s-style party flip.
Hell, I re-registered as a Democrat this year, and I even watched the convention. 14-year-old Naderite me would be shocked.
My folks improved, incidentally. As they’ve aged, they’ve gone from “fiscal conservative” DLC Democrats to left-wing Democrats. So there’s two more data points against “you get more conservative as you age”. They do watch too much MSNBC though.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ThresherK:
This reminds me of a quote from Lee Atwater regarding the 1988 campaign that he knew they were going to beat Dukakis as soon as he (Atwater) saw photos of Dukakis walking around wearing topsiders.
Barry
@Afferent Input: “There is absolute truth to the idea that a person’s formative years makes a critical impact on political ideology through the rest of their lives. The baby boomers, now fast approaching 65+, lean to the GOP because of the swing to the right about 35 years ago primarily due to St. Ronnie. Thye grew up loving the Gipper, and in Gipper they trust. Nothing will change that for them. This kind of sucks for progressive politics for the next 10-15 years because olds tend to vote in large numbers.”
I believe that you are thinking of Gen X. IIRC, Gen X is to the right of both the Boomers and the Millenials.
According to that article (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/bush-may-haunt-republicans-for.html), the Boomers and Gen-Y lean Democratic; Gen-X is more GOP, but even still net Democratic.
gorram
@gene108: Clinton “won Arkansas, Louisiana and other states that are now solidly Republican.”
Golly gee, I wonder why the former governor of Arkansas was able to carry the state of Arkansas.
The real problem with your example though is that you picked the closest thing to a three way race in recent history – Clinton won a lot of the rural South and Midwest to a degree unthinkable today (just compare the county bubbles here), because the two third of the voters who didn’t pick him broke even between Perot and Papa Bush. Add that on to his unique ability to connect with poor White Southerners (which Gore explicitly lacked) and you get a massive Democratic win in 1992.
You could see that process actually starting to break down in the map I already linked to in 1996 – a lot of the rural counties in the South and Midwest were shifting red, given that Perot didn’t seem as viable a conservative third option (although they had the Libertarian and Constitution Parties to fall back on which were bigger deals in rural counties then).
Then, in 2000 we got a new Dem candidate who couldn’t connect with poor rural voters (Gore was so very clearly from the Southern aristocracy), Perot had given up, and the biggest conservative third party (the Reform Party) basically self destructed and picked a Blah women to be their VP candidate (no seriously). And the Supreme Court still had to award Bush the election – it still wasn’t enough. Looking back to the maps I linked to you can see how close it was, but keep in mind the popular vote still just barely edged out Gore.
2004 was pretty much a repeat of 2000 – all the conservative third parties were bit players if that, the Dems went with a clearly old money guy for President, and the Republicans may or may not have fixed Ohio. They clearly relied heavily on social wedge issues and the climate of fear and paranoia they’d spent four years creating. The map shows that this was pretty much a do-over of 2000 with rural counties that are key in the Midwest and South falling rather Republican.
2008 is the last year they have data for obviously, but it’s the most interesting. Like 2000/2004 there wasn’t much in the way of a third party challenge from the right, but like 1996/1992 the Dem nominee was very much so not old money and concerted efforts to prevent voter suppression were underway in competitive states like Ohio and many low-turnout urban areas like Los Angeles county. The rural Midwest and occasional counties in the Rockies showed a huge shift back toward Democrats, even if the South stayed the Republican course (can’t image why that would be – it’s almost like Obama is Blah or something).
2012 so far is promising to be a musical chairs version of 2008 – we’ll keep the down-to-earth Democratic nominee (like 1992/1996), but we’ll lose the protection from voter suppression or tampering in a lot of states like Ohio and Florida (like 2000/2004), and the juries still out over whether Gary Johnson and other third parties might exert some pull on angry factions in the GOP camp (potentially like a slightly milder 1992/1996). I’m betting we’ll see it as more or less a repeat of 2008 – with Dems rebuilding their in-roads with rural voters in the Midwest and parts of the Rockies but having no luck with much of the South.
So… yes the Dems are losing certain areas in Presidential elections compared to two decades ago, but only very specific ones and as part of a whole lot of influences on Presidential races’ outcomes.
Halcyon
@FormerSwingVoter:
As another Certified Yoof, seriously, listen to this guy. The internet really has changed everything. All of the reasons everyone else has hit on are true, but they’re almost all a result of the internet. We’re not part of the old media institutions. We’re more connected, and we know how to find out what’s going on in the world around us. We know lots of other people who aren’t like us.
It was also, I think just as importantly, the first time that the conservatives trying to squeeze couldn’t work as well as they needed it to. The internet has meant that we’re all a part of some subculture or another. Gamers, crafty people, music lovers, nerds, geeks, dorks, furries, bronies, weird fetishes, weird sports enthusiasts, goths, hipsters, cos-players, board gamers, role-players, and that’s just the list I can put together off the top of my head. We’re all part of some subculture with a community. I think, as a result, our identification with the historical tribal groups the conservatives depend on is weaker than it’s ever been. Which isn’t to say it’s not there, obviously, it still is, but it’s starting to crack, I think, especially among us youngsters.
Scamp Dog
@Ken, @blingee, @TooManyJens: Me too. I started off sort-of-conservative, reluctantly voted for Reagan because the Repubs had convinced me that Carter and Mondale were worse, but every Republican administration has moved me to the left. The next one may make me a bomb-throwing revolutionary. (Not intended to be a factual statement. When I start talking about being a bomb-planting revolutionary, it will be time to get worried).
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Afferent Input: I’m sorry, but I grew up watching Johnson and Nixon fuck up, not Reagan. My g-generation is nothing if not schizophrenic. Half of us recoiled in horror from Nixon and became DFH’s, the other half embraced him and his Southern Strategy.
mclaren
You don’t know too many young people, do you?
They can’t get a fucking job. So they’re looking at life in total poverty living in their parents’ basement getting hammered with hundreds of thousands of dollars of loan payments on advanced college degrees that turned out to be worthless.
The Republicans have promised to slash the social safety net, so those young people living in total poverty can look forward to getting crushed even more savagely if they vote Republican.
Are you getting the picture?
There are no jobs for people under age 35. None. Nothing. Zero.
Because the current Republican party would have to switch its policies to Democratic ones in order to appeal to younger voters.
Younger votes desperately need jobs. That’s what Democrats are proposing, measures to crank up the economy and increase government spending to prime the pump and provide jobs. What are Republicans proposing? Shutting down government spending, which will slow the economy even further and ensure fewer jobs for young people.
Younger voters desperately need debt relief. That’s what Democrats are proposing, courtesy of Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And what are Republicans proposing. Ferocious non-stop opposition to the CFPB and any kind of debt relief to anyone anywhere.
Younger voters need housing assistance because of rents they can’t afford, they need better public transportation courtesy of government revenue-sharing because of cars they can’t afford, and they need more education grants like the PELL grants because of tuitions they can’t afford. What are Republicans promising? To gut public transpo monies, to slash educational grants, to zero out housing assistance monies.
I volunteer in a number of a non-profit collectives that once upon a time might have served mainly homeless people. Today, they mainly serve students. Do you have any idea how many students are on food stamps? Do you have any idea how desperate the typical student is today for a simple bicycle to get around on?
To appeal to young people, Republicans would have to start offering Democratic policy proposals. It’s just that simple. Services like free church meals and hours-worked-for-a-free-bicycle are now mainly serving students and impoverished young people instead of the homeless. America is destroying an entire generation of young people, and the Republicans are proud of it and want more of it. The Democrats are the only ones even talking about doing anything to help.
Mystery solved.
mclaren
@nastybrutishntall:
Stop right there.
You’re talking about a country in which Ayn Rand’s paeans to selfish greed have sold more copies than the Bible.
The GOP will never be put out of its misery. Not in America. In this country of craven bully-worshipers, there will always be a seller’s market for brutal adulation of thuggish rapacity and limitless narcissistic sociopathy.
nastybrutishntall
@mclaren: um, I guess you missed the part where I said it would be replaced with a Libertarian party. Money will always throw its own party. I think the strategy of the future is to appeal to selfishness AND hedonism, with a bone thrown to civil liberties (for the wealthy), so you can have your cake and eat birth control too. You just can’t have a safety net.