Brace for new GOP efforts to stop younger Americans from voting
The Financial Times offers data showing how the Great Recession reset how Millennials view the world. Something odd appears to be overturning an old paradigm about political views and aging. Unlike the generational cohorts before them, they are not getting more conservative with age.
“The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass,” writes John Burn-Murdoch.
“[C]oncepts from public health analytics” suggest the old predictions do not apply to Millennials:
Let’s start with age effects, and the oldest rule in politics: people become more conservative with age. If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.
Nothing like a global financial meltdown to get one to reevaluate the elusive promise of the American Dream:
Could some force be pushing voters of all ages away from the right? In the UK there has certainly been an event. Support for the Tories plummeted across all ages during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, and has only partially rebounded. But a population-wide effect cannot completely explain millennials’ liberal exceptionalism, nor why we see the same pattern in the US without the same shock.
So the most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.
This is borne out by US survey data showing that, having reached political maturity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, millennials are tacking much further to the left on economics than previous generations did, favouring greater redistribution from rich to poor.
Similar patterns are evident in Britain, where millennials are more economically leftwing than Gen-Xers and boomers were at the same age, and Brexit has alienated a higher share of former Tory backers among this generation than any other. Even before Truss, two-thirds of millennials who had backed the Conservatives before the EU referendum were no longer planning to vote for the party again, and one in four said they now strongly disliked the Tories.
The data is clear that millennials are not simply going to age into conservatism. To reverse a cohort effect, you have to do something for that cohort. Home ownership continues to prove more elusive for millennials than for earlier generations at the same age in both countries. With houses increasingly difficult to afford, a good place to start would be to help more millennials get on to the housing ladder. Serious proposals for reforming two of the world’s most expensive childcare systems would be another.
American conservatives are not likely to do anything of the sort for a cohort of voters not firmly in their tribe. If the models are correct, the Republican base will continue to shrink of a few decades, leaving them to do what they’ve done for years as a minority party: shrink the electorate to tilt the playing field to their favor.
Democrats had best not ignore leveraging this generational advantage. It’s a layup.