This rundown of the generational divide among Democrats and Republicans in the 2020 election may surprise you:
Biden, predictably, obliterated Trump with the youngest voters – members of the so-called Generation Z, born after 1996, as well as younger millennials. Exit polls had Biden winning 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points, 60-36, whereas Pew pegs it at 58-38. Exit polls also showed Trump with just a 52-47 edge among voters over 65, and Pew’s numbers came in almost identical – 52-48 for Trump over Biden. And if those were the only topline stats you saw, you wouldn’t think there was a huge problem for Republicans.
But Pew also broke the survey down into not just age groups but generational cohorts. And it’s here where you’ll find the most terrifying information for the GOP. According to Pew, Trump won a decisive majority only with members of the “Silent Generation,” those born between 1928 and 1945 (and the extremely tiny number of living people older than that). Trump dominated that cohort by 16 points, 58-42. That means that the only reliably Republican voter bloc will shrink considerably between now and 2024, and that 65- to 74-year-olds must have been a much more blue-leaning group in 2020 to produce Trump’s comparatively narrow 4-point margin with all over-65s.
That’s the baby boomer cohort and there is a boatload of them. If the GOP can’t get a huge majority of them, they have a problem:
You don’t need a degree in actuarial science to know that in general, 65- to 74-year-olds will be around considerably longer than 75- to 102-year-olds. According to the Social Security Administration, a 65-year-old man has a remaining life expectancy of almost 18 years. At 75, it’s just over 11 years, and at 85 it’s less than six. Members of the Silent Generation are expected to shrink from 9 percent of the voting eligible population in 2020 to 7 percent in 2024. And while I hope that my over-75 parents are around as long as humanly possible, if I were a GOP operative I would be apoplectically trying to figure out ways to make the age profile of the average party supporter substantially younger, rather than tripling down on whatever Fox-driven cultural hysteria is dominating headlines in the conservative media. This stuff is not resonating with anyone who has more than 30 years to live.
Perhaps even worse for former President Trump and his acolytes, the Pew data showed little erosion in the millennial preference for Democrats over Republicans. Fifty-six percent of millennials voted for Clinton in 2016, and 58 percent voted for Biden in 2020. Remember, the first millennials voted in 2002, and as a group they simply have not budged. “Elder millennials” are turning 40 this year and they don’t love the Republican Party any more than they did when George W. Bush was lighting several trillion dollars on fire prosecuting a pointless war in Iraq. And that’s terrible news for the GOP’s hopes of ever becoming a majority party again, because if they keep losing the youngest voters by double digits election after election, they need a significant number of them to get more conservative as they age just to hold current margins in place.
That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win the next several elections, even if the playing field is fair. “Demography is destiny” as a theory has aged badly, largely because Republicans remain competitive at the national level even as the country becomes more diverse and less white. Trump’s gains among Latino voters helped avert a total bloodbath in 2020, and there is no particular reason why Republicans couldn’t do better with them in 2024, in theory.
After all, Democrats’ deteriorating performance with non-college educated white voters over the past decade offset the ongoing diversification of the electorate. But according to Pew, the rightward march of white voters was halted and marginally reversed by Joe Biden in 2020, who did 4 points better with non-college-educated whites than Clinton. Republicans may have already run headlong into a white ceiling.
Republicans also continue to make up zero ground with young people. This year’s Harvard Youth Poll of 18- to 29-year-olds was the same horror show for the GOP that it has been for years, and it included yet another year of newly eligible voters who are repulsed by the dyspeptic, off-putting spectacle of the modern Republican Party, whose leading thinkers and politicians are staking their 2022 election strategy on a Woke Panic gambit dependent on demonizing an obscure academic concept (Critical Race Theory) and convincing voters that their imminent (and completely imagined) “cancellation” is their most important problem.
From the looks of these numbers, the most loyal GOP cohort actually is going to be cancelled very soon. By life.
So far, the majority of millennials aren’t getting any more conservative. And there are tons of them.. The boomers a split which, as I said, is very bad news because there are a whole bunch of them as well. It’sa problem.