In the last decade, voters over 65 years old
have become more Republican, even as the electorate as a whole
has been trending in the opposite direction. In 2004, George W.
Bush won that demographic by a margin of 8 percentage points,
but won the national popular vote by just 2.5. Eight years
later, Mitt Romney did even better with older voters. He beat
Barack Obama by 12 percentage points among seniors, despite
losing overall by nearly 4 percentage points.
It’s not simply that people get more conservative as they age,
despite whatever Winston Churchill is alleged to have said. As
late as 2000, there was little difference in presidential voting
between the old and the young. In theory, the growing age gap in
partisanship could be a reaction to President Obama’s policy
agenda, with its focus on health care for those ineligible for
Medicare — but we started to see the drift even before Obama.
Likewise, it’s tempting to credit broader demographic changes,
as younger voters are a more ethnically and racially diverse
group. But that can’t be the whole story; the same trends are
evident among non-Hispanic whites.
It turns out that today’s partisan shifts among older voters owe
less to President Obama and more to President Dwight D.
Eisenhower.
One of the seminal early studies of the American voter — aptly
titled The American Voter, from 1960 — noticed a critical
feature of the 1950s electorate: Attachment to the two parties
wasn’t distributed evenly across age groups. Instead, those
voters who had come of age around the time of the New Deal were
staunchly more Democratic than their counterparts before or
after. “[T]he impact of the Depression is unmistakable in the
images of the parties that we find in the public mind long after
that tragic decade had passed,” the authors wrote.
Even with the major changes in American politics since the New
Deal — the end of the Solid South, the rise of television, the
polarization of the political parties — the claim that political
generations matter has stood up remarkably well. When voters
enter the electorate, still in their adolescence, their
attachment to the political parties isn’t especially developed.
They are less likely to think of themselves as strong Democrats
or Republicans, and also less likely to see the world through
that prism. That means that the political conditions at the time
are especially important to the youngest voters. If the
president in power is presiding over good times, young voters
swing toward that party. As with presidential approval, good
times are usually defined in terms of bread and peace: How is
the economy? And if a war is being fought, how is it going? If
those yardsticks suggest times are bad, a president is likely to
be perceived as unsuccessful and to cost his party support. But
what’s more unexpected is that voters stay with the party they
identify with at age 18, developing an attachment that is likely
to persist — and to shape how they see politics down the road.
To see the echoes of politics past, I turned to the Institute
for the Study of Citizens and Politics panel that researchers at
the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University
collected during the 2012 election. Specifically, I coded
partisanship as ranging from 1 to 7, where 1 meant “strong
Democrat” and 7 meant “strong Republican.” From there, I plotted
the partisan loyalties of the respondents by the year in which
they turned 18, averaging them over the two cohorts above and
below. The figure below shows the results for just over 1,800
non-Hispanic white voters, although those for non-white voters
are surprisingly similar.1 The dotted lines are the beginnings
of each president’s administration.
The most Republican group is the one that came of age early in
the Eisenhower presidency, with those turning 18 during the
Reagan presidency coming in second.2 Voters who turned 18 during
the final years of the Carter administration aren’t exactly big
fans of the Democrats, either, whether due to the tough economic
times or challenges abroad. By contrast, the most Democratic
group is the one that came of age during George W. Bush’s
presidency, especially its later years as perceptions of the
Iraq War became more negative.
The legacies of presidents like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B.
Johnson, Bill Clinton and even Richard Nixon are more muted. In
part, the political tumult of the 1960s may have thrown a wrench
into the usual process of developing a partisan identity. At the
time, what it meant to be a Democrat or a Republican was
changing. The Democratic Party was no longer the dominant party
of white Southerners, but blacks in the north and south were
increasingly siding with the Democrats. And with the Democrats’
deep internal divisions over Vietnam, the party wasn’t the
obvious choice for foreign-policy hawks, either.
Notice, too, that the oldest voters in the chart above were
those who came of age while Harry Truman was president. Those
same voters prove to be more Democratic than those born a few
years later, even when asked in 2012. More than 60 years after
Truman stepped down and Eisenhower took office, the legacy of
that transfer is still shaping voter choice.
This research offers one key lesson for parties: Perform today,
benefit tomorrow. (A quick glance at the age breakdowns for New
York Mets’ and Yankees’ fans suggests that it’s not just a
lesson for political parties.) But the decades-old legacy of
political conditions also highlights the problems facing our two
major parties: Democrats have no lock on younger voters, and
Republicans are bound by their advantage among older ones.
FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten and the Monkey Cage’s John Sides
have pointed out precisely this former point, noting that voters
who have come of age during Obama’s presidency are less inclined
toward the Democratic Party than their counterparts who are just
a few years older. Young voters’ support helped make Obama
president. But that in no way guarantees that his presidency
will make them life-long Democrats.
The prominence of the Eisenhower generation in today’s GOP also
points to a dilemma on that side of the aisle. In part because
of events decades ago, the base of today’s GOP has an atypical
share of older voters. That in turn has forced the party’s hand
on policy. As Republicans have tried to cut federal spending,
they’ve had to tip-toe around two of the largest items in the
federal budget, Social Security and Medicare, because those
programs enjoy robust support from older voters. Want to
understand why the 2011 deal to make across-the-board budget
cuts went so deeply into discretionary and military spending
while leaving Social Security and Medicare untouched? Our
particular demographic moment in politics — and the unexpected
coalitions it has produced — is one good place to start. |