Talkin' 'Bout My Generation
There’s been a lot of news this month concerning the legal status of gay marriage. First, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Iowa constitution precluded a ban on gay marriage, in effect legalizing the practice. The ruling was significant because it happened in Iowa, for reasons I’ll get into later. Soon after, Vermont’s legislature legalized gay marriage. This got somewhat less attention because, well, it’s Vermont, but the passage was also significant because Vermont became the first state to legalize gay marriage via an act of the legislature and not a court decision. In fact, the Vermont bill received over two-third of the vote in both houses. Finally, getting even less attention, the Washington D.C. city council voted unanimously to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere and will soon consider a full-fledged gay marriage bill. This too is significant, because everything the D.C. city council does is subject to a review by Congress (because heaven forbid the people of the District have any right to run their own business) and so it sets up the possibility of a contentious vote on the issue in Congress.
Conservatives, fresh off of getting waxed in everyway imaginable in ’06 and ‘08, think that, after two straight cycles of building failed election strategies around divisive wedge issues, they finally have the divisive wedge issue that will lead them back to electoral success. The reality, however, is that if conservatives are politically savvy (and all the evidence suggests they’re not) they should actually be very concerned over the prospect that gay rights issues could play a large role in the 2012 Republican nomination contest. That’s because a campaign for the votes of people opposed to gay marriage is basically a campaign for the votes of old people.
I should start by correcting a misconception that has persisted across both time and party lines, the belief that people are more likely to be liberal in their youth, and then as a cohort become more conservative as they age. There’s even an old joke about it that goes, “If you’re not voting Democrat when you’re 20, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not voting Republican by 40, you don’t have a brain.”
The evidence, however, points to something much different. A recent study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Vermont found that, if anything, people tend to become more liberal and tolerant as they age. What drives the stereotype is not that people become more conservative, but that each age cohort brings its own world view to the electorate. Today’s young voters are broadly—though not entirely—tolerant on issues of racial and religious diversity, gay marriage and immigration. Today’s older voters by and large aren’t. That’s not because those voters became more conservative as they aged; rather, it’s because fifty years ago, people were often much more hostile to those things. My age cohort is far more liberal than the one born fifty years ago, and as a group, we’ll likely retain that character as long as we continue to vote.
Similarly, people don’t gradually shift their party preference as they age. Most people, once they come to identify strongly with one party (usually defined as voting for that party in three straight elections), keep that prefernce for life. If people do shift parties, it’s often as part of a sudden, drastic change in political outlook, not as a gradual drift. As a result, traditionally there has not been much disparity in presidential elections between how young people voted and how the nation as a whole voted. From 1976 through 2000, the share of young people voting Democratic was always fairly close to the national figure. The one way in which young people did vote differently was in their increased willingness to vote for independents, including centrists like John Anderson and Ross Perot. But overperformance by Democrats among youths was always small or negligible. (The 26th Amendment, enfranchising everyone over the age of 18, wasn’t passed until 1971, so there’s no useful data from before that date.)
That started to change in 2004, when John Kerry won 54% of the youth vote against 48% of the overall vote. The six-point spread is significant, and comes across as being more so because it spans the magical 50% line. At the time, I hypothesized, mostly on anecdotal evidence, that Kerry’s spread was likely even stronger among voters 18-25, i.e., the ones who would still count as young voters in 2008, when a Democratic candidate would likely perform even better among young voters. That did in fact happen, and while it certainly doesn’t prove the hypothesis, the evidence from 2008 is consistent with it.
In 2008, Barack Obama won 66% of young voters, against 53% overall. That is the largest figure, both in percent of young voters won and difference from the overall vote, put up by any presidential candidate, from any party, since the passage of the 26th Amendment. If my hypothesis is correct, many of the young Obama voters were voting for the Democratic presidential candidate for the second or even third time; the spread did not come entirely—or even largely—from first-time voters swept up in Obamania. What that would represent, then, is a cohort of voters with an overwhelming and fairly well entrenched partisan preference toward Democrats, and who are unlikely to abandon that preference absent some sort of drastic realignment between the two major parties.
So if conservatives are assuming that people my age are one day going to wake up, realize that they’ve always been closet conservatives led astray by the Obama charisma, and start voting Republican, they’re deeply mistaken. This does seem to be their theory, though. The idea seems to be that even though Obama ran on an unabashedly liberal agenda and is now doing pretty much exactly what he promised to do, that young people will quickly realize that all this competent government stuff isn’t what we voted for and then tack hard to the right. I suppose that’s not impossible, but there’s no particular evidence to suggest that it would ever happen. In fact, it seems to be predicated on the belief that we, as a generation, are not very intelligent.
The Republican strategy for winning back the young voters that are absolutely repulsed by their ideology appears to be as follows: “We’ll keep doing what we’ve always done … but more of it!” Ramping up the culture war against gay rights would fall neatly into the “but more of it!” category. The problem is that young voters just aren’t that interested in telling other people how to run their own lives. That’s not to say our generation is overwhelmingly actually pro gay marriage per se. It’s just that we’re not really that troubled that other people have come to life decisions that are different than ours.
This shows in exit polling on social issues. Even though Proposition 8 was approved by California voters, 61% of young voters opposed it. Support for a live-and-let-live attitude for gay couples polls better among young people than it does for any other age bracket. Nate Silver, who does all kinds of incredibly insightful things with polling data, was able to construct a highly predictive model of how states would vote on gay marriage bans using only three variables, and the most important of those was time—the further in future the vote happens, the less likely people are to codify discrimination against gays. As such, Iowa and Vermont will not likely be the only states to liberalize marriage laws in the near future.
I mentioned that the Iowa decision was important because it happened in Iowa. Beside the fact that Iowa is the first state away from the two coasts to legalize gay marriage, and thus take the debate directly into middle America, its also crucial because Iowa and its famous caucuses will be disproportionately influential in choosing the next Republican presidential candidate. And while the nation as a whole is really not moved by the gay marriage issue, Republican primary voters are, and it’s reasonable to think that this decision will make it more likely that Iowa Republicans will choose a candidate who is strongly anti-gay marriage.
That, in and of itself, actually isn’t that problematic. The problem is that Iowa conservatives aren’t likely to get behind a candidate for whom a dispassionate opposition to gay marriage is simply one issue out of many in his platform. This is likely to turn into a contest over who can do the best Chicken Little spiel about how gay marriage will destroy everything we hold dear. And this goes back to everything I said in the “Woody Gets an Election” post. You might well find a candidate with a principled, non-homophobic opposition to gay marriage as part of a range of reasonable positions on other issues. But someone who claims that gay marriage is the seminal issue of our time and must be stopped before it kills America is a nut, and probably not just a nut about that issues. That person likely has a diversified portfolio of wingnut pipe dreams, like a Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin (both of whom are anathema to young people in a way that, say, pro-civil union Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman would not be).
In short, the slew of legal advancements this month actually makes it slightly more likely that Republicans will nominate a candidate for president in 2012 who favors deeply intrusive regulations on social issues and thus is very unappealing to my age group. Republicans would like to think that the Iowa decision and others like it are their ticket back to relevance. But if they want to abdicate the youth vote for a few more cycles and thus create a Democratic cohort so large and calcified that it ensures the irrelevancy of movement conservatism for decades, my advice to them is to keep doing what they’ve always done … but more of it.
Conservatives, fresh off of getting waxed in everyway imaginable in ’06 and ‘08, think that, after two straight cycles of building failed election strategies around divisive wedge issues, they finally have the divisive wedge issue that will lead them back to electoral success. The reality, however, is that if conservatives are politically savvy (and all the evidence suggests they’re not) they should actually be very concerned over the prospect that gay rights issues could play a large role in the 2012 Republican nomination contest. That’s because a campaign for the votes of people opposed to gay marriage is basically a campaign for the votes of old people.
I should start by correcting a misconception that has persisted across both time and party lines, the belief that people are more likely to be liberal in their youth, and then as a cohort become more conservative as they age. There’s even an old joke about it that goes, “If you’re not voting Democrat when you’re 20, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not voting Republican by 40, you don’t have a brain.”
The evidence, however, points to something much different. A recent study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Vermont found that, if anything, people tend to become more liberal and tolerant as they age. What drives the stereotype is not that people become more conservative, but that each age cohort brings its own world view to the electorate. Today’s young voters are broadly—though not entirely—tolerant on issues of racial and religious diversity, gay marriage and immigration. Today’s older voters by and large aren’t. That’s not because those voters became more conservative as they aged; rather, it’s because fifty years ago, people were often much more hostile to those things. My age cohort is far more liberal than the one born fifty years ago, and as a group, we’ll likely retain that character as long as we continue to vote.
Similarly, people don’t gradually shift their party preference as they age. Most people, once they come to identify strongly with one party (usually defined as voting for that party in three straight elections), keep that prefernce for life. If people do shift parties, it’s often as part of a sudden, drastic change in political outlook, not as a gradual drift. As a result, traditionally there has not been much disparity in presidential elections between how young people voted and how the nation as a whole voted. From 1976 through 2000, the share of young people voting Democratic was always fairly close to the national figure. The one way in which young people did vote differently was in their increased willingness to vote for independents, including centrists like John Anderson and Ross Perot. But overperformance by Democrats among youths was always small or negligible. (The 26th Amendment, enfranchising everyone over the age of 18, wasn’t passed until 1971, so there’s no useful data from before that date.)
That started to change in 2004, when John Kerry won 54% of the youth vote against 48% of the overall vote. The six-point spread is significant, and comes across as being more so because it spans the magical 50% line. At the time, I hypothesized, mostly on anecdotal evidence, that Kerry’s spread was likely even stronger among voters 18-25, i.e., the ones who would still count as young voters in 2008, when a Democratic candidate would likely perform even better among young voters. That did in fact happen, and while it certainly doesn’t prove the hypothesis, the evidence from 2008 is consistent with it.
In 2008, Barack Obama won 66% of young voters, against 53% overall. That is the largest figure, both in percent of young voters won and difference from the overall vote, put up by any presidential candidate, from any party, since the passage of the 26th Amendment. If my hypothesis is correct, many of the young Obama voters were voting for the Democratic presidential candidate for the second or even third time; the spread did not come entirely—or even largely—from first-time voters swept up in Obamania. What that would represent, then, is a cohort of voters with an overwhelming and fairly well entrenched partisan preference toward Democrats, and who are unlikely to abandon that preference absent some sort of drastic realignment between the two major parties.
So if conservatives are assuming that people my age are one day going to wake up, realize that they’ve always been closet conservatives led astray by the Obama charisma, and start voting Republican, they’re deeply mistaken. This does seem to be their theory, though. The idea seems to be that even though Obama ran on an unabashedly liberal agenda and is now doing pretty much exactly what he promised to do, that young people will quickly realize that all this competent government stuff isn’t what we voted for and then tack hard to the right. I suppose that’s not impossible, but there’s no particular evidence to suggest that it would ever happen. In fact, it seems to be predicated on the belief that we, as a generation, are not very intelligent.
The Republican strategy for winning back the young voters that are absolutely repulsed by their ideology appears to be as follows: “We’ll keep doing what we’ve always done … but more of it!” Ramping up the culture war against gay rights would fall neatly into the “but more of it!” category. The problem is that young voters just aren’t that interested in telling other people how to run their own lives. That’s not to say our generation is overwhelmingly actually pro gay marriage per se. It’s just that we’re not really that troubled that other people have come to life decisions that are different than ours.
This shows in exit polling on social issues. Even though Proposition 8 was approved by California voters, 61% of young voters opposed it. Support for a live-and-let-live attitude for gay couples polls better among young people than it does for any other age bracket. Nate Silver, who does all kinds of incredibly insightful things with polling data, was able to construct a highly predictive model of how states would vote on gay marriage bans using only three variables, and the most important of those was time—the further in future the vote happens, the less likely people are to codify discrimination against gays. As such, Iowa and Vermont will not likely be the only states to liberalize marriage laws in the near future.
I mentioned that the Iowa decision was important because it happened in Iowa. Beside the fact that Iowa is the first state away from the two coasts to legalize gay marriage, and thus take the debate directly into middle America, its also crucial because Iowa and its famous caucuses will be disproportionately influential in choosing the next Republican presidential candidate. And while the nation as a whole is really not moved by the gay marriage issue, Republican primary voters are, and it’s reasonable to think that this decision will make it more likely that Iowa Republicans will choose a candidate who is strongly anti-gay marriage.
That, in and of itself, actually isn’t that problematic. The problem is that Iowa conservatives aren’t likely to get behind a candidate for whom a dispassionate opposition to gay marriage is simply one issue out of many in his platform. This is likely to turn into a contest over who can do the best Chicken Little spiel about how gay marriage will destroy everything we hold dear. And this goes back to everything I said in the “Woody Gets an Election” post. You might well find a candidate with a principled, non-homophobic opposition to gay marriage as part of a range of reasonable positions on other issues. But someone who claims that gay marriage is the seminal issue of our time and must be stopped before it kills America is a nut, and probably not just a nut about that issues. That person likely has a diversified portfolio of wingnut pipe dreams, like a Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin (both of whom are anathema to young people in a way that, say, pro-civil union Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman would not be).
In short, the slew of legal advancements this month actually makes it slightly more likely that Republicans will nominate a candidate for president in 2012 who favors deeply intrusive regulations on social issues and thus is very unappealing to my age group. Republicans would like to think that the Iowa decision and others like it are their ticket back to relevance. But if they want to abdicate the youth vote for a few more cycles and thus create a Democratic cohort so large and calcified that it ensures the irrelevancy of movement conservatism for decades, my advice to them is to keep doing what they’ve always done … but more of it.
posted by Ithakid | 8:09 PM
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