This is seriously—and frequently—overlooked. Turning 18 between now and 2020? All you realistically remember is Obama and the beginning of Trump. https://t.co/m0WBpxZJ37
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) November 8, 2017
I’m 37. I’m not quite a Generation X’er and I am definately not a Millenial. I bought my first cell phone my junior year of college and I am profoundly aware of the sound of a 1200 BAUD modem connecting to the UMass Lowell Unix servers as well as having many memories of yelling at my sister who wanted to talk on the phone as I was reading soc.history.what-if.
My first presidential vote was for Al Gore. By 2006, I was a super-voter. Since 2004 I have missed one election (Pennsylvania 2017 primary) as I had moved to North Carolina by then and was in the process of switching my registration. I am weird. For my cohort, I had a much higher probability of voting than my matched control peers.
My peers and I have always leaned Democratic as a cohort. We are now entering into prime voting participation ages. The cohorts behind me still don’t vote their numbers yet but they lean even more heavily Democratic than my cohort. Some of it is a function of race/ethnicity confounding age but there is still a dramatic implication that their political formation was Bush-Obama-Trump.
It won’t matter too much in 2018 or 2020 but there is a massive python lump of voters coming through who lean Dem but will begin turning out at higher rates just as Republican base voters decrease in numbers due to differential age related mortality.