Could young voters swing right? The conflict between the hip liberal youth and their forebearers, the conservative squares, seems at times like a law of politics. However, politics is a perpetually shifting field and Democrats face serious potential vulnerabilities with Millennials.
While we may presume that the quip about any man under thirty who isn’t a liberal has no heart and any man over forty who isn’t conservative has no brain, looking at actual elections shows that reality is a bit more complicated, news which ought to give Republican candidates new hope. True, young people were more liberal than their parents and did rush out to elect Democrats with lofty aims of promoting social welfare, but this happened in the 1960s. Less than a generation later, the same age group was voting for Reagan.
Politics is a game played on an ever-shifting field. Although Democrats appear to have the youth vote neatly wrapped, the voters who swept Barack Obama into office in 2008 were those who came of age during the years of the Bush presidency. They see the root of their current woes in the policies of the present administration.
As David Leonhardt observed in The New York Times:
To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign. They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the world’s problems.
“We’re in a period in which the federal government is simply not performing,” says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, the author of a recent book on generational politics, “and that can’t be good for the Democrats.”
People are fickle and hard to predict though. To the simple metric of age one can easily add a host of economic and racial variables, each with their own influences. Still, the point remains, after years of stagnant growth under President Obama, Democrats will face different challenges connecting to today’s teenagers than they did with today’s 25-30-year-olds.
