There was a fair amount of skepticism going into the presidential election as to whether President Obama could count on younger voters' support the way he did four years ago. But it's clear the youth vote once again made a critical difference, as a new Pew Research Center report helped document.
The divide between young voters and older voters was as stark this year as it was in 2008. While Obama lost ground among voters younger than 30, he still won this age group by 24 points over Mitt Romney (60% to 36%). [...]
In Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, Obama also failed to win a majority of voters 30 and older. Yet he swept all four battleground states, in part because he won majorities of 60% or more among young voters.
Just as critically, young people made up as large a share of the overall electorate as they did in 2008, according to the national exit poll (19% in 2012, 18% in 2008). As recently as September, young voters were significantly less engaged in the campaign than they had been four years earlier. But their interest and engagement levels increased in the campaign's final weeks.
As a matter of election analysis, this is certainly noteworthy data, which helps explain why the president was able to do as well as he did.
But in the larger context, this has even greater salience. There's been ample talk of late about Republicans having a "demographics" problem -- the GOP is an overwhelmingly white party with pockets of regional appeal in a nation that's growing more racially and ethnically diverse.
But as Pew helps remind us, Republicans also have a serious generational problem that should also make the party nervous.
Reflecting on the Pew Center's report, Jon Chait explained that younger voters aren't just voting Democratic more than older generations; they're also vastly more liberal than their elders, which has the potential to force "a full-scale sea change in American politics."
Democrats today must amass huge majorities of moderate voters in order to overcome conservatives' numerical advantage over liberals. They must carefully wrap any proposal for activist government within the strictures of limited government, which is why Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, and Obama has promised not to raise taxes for 99 percent of Americans. It's entirely possible that, by the time today's twentysomethings have reached middle age, these sorts of limits will cease to apply.
Obviously, such a future hinges on the generational patterns of the last two election cycles persisting. But, as another Pew survey showed, generational patterns to tend to be sticky. It's not the case that voters start out liberal and move rightward. Americans form a voting pattern early in their life and tend to hold to it. That isn't to say something couldn't shake these voters loose from their attachment to the liberal worldview. Republicans fervently (and plausibly) hoped the Great Recession would be that thing; having voted for Obama and borne the brunt of mass unemployment, once-idealistic voters would stare at the faded Obama posters on their wall and accept the Republican analysis that failed Big Government policies have brought about their misery.
But young voters haven't drawn this conclusion -- or not many of them have, at any rate.
Nate Cohn had a related piece last week, published before the Pew study came out, noting that the GOP's problems with younger voters seems likely to get worse, not better, in part because of younger voters' racial and ethnic diversity, and in part because of their distaste for the Republicans' culture war.
When GOP leaders ponder what steps they'll need to compete in the near future, they'd be wise to add "stop alienating young people" to the to-do list.
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they AREN'T ACTING like they're nervous.
it looks to me like they're doing the very same things that helped repubs to LOSE this election.
not that they would have won....
This piece ignores why the Youth vote showed up in 2012, while it is typically lots of talk but "I forgot" no shows in other elections. Even in 2008, Obama girl "forgot". What would have the Carter vs Reagan or the Gore vs. Bush contests been like if their Youth vote numbers were not so dismal? Progressive party hacks have always been dismissive of GOTV and the youth vote and they HATE the market oriented data analysis of the OFA approach because it tends to make their "political instincts" less valuable, and therefore less meritorious of high compensation packages- both in money and appointments. Behavioral psychology was the key, but it a technology that respects no ideology. Aynn Rand has great appeal among alienated young adults, and a motivated libertarian OFA like operation would have little difficulty mobilizing a major conservative youth vote. When the Koch brothers wake up from this hangover, they may realize that it was not that big money has no effect, but that they were using their big money ineffectively on blow hards like Rove.
That's why progressives are at a disadvantage. Obama will likely disband or be unwilling to allow OFA independence as an activist group free to agitate against him. To fill the need, there is no focused progressive drivers who would assemble a group to use OFA techniques to get like minded voters to the polls not just in presidential elections, but in mid term and the increasingly appreciated importance of the state elections.
The Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce do not have that problem of loss of focus.
Dude- did you bother reading the article above?
MORE young people voted this election than last time so your first sentence is inapplicable.
Second- it is hard to see progressives at a disadvantage when the youth vote went for Obama by >over 20 points<.
Your response is the typical Republican response to this election that it isn't the message it was the messenger, or turnout, or whatever.
Guess what- the youth of America are not responding to what the Republicans have to offer, and if they don't change their ideas, they will continue to lose the youth vote by wide margins.
Young people scoff at Ayn Rand, way too much reality in thier lives to fall for a ruse like that. These young folks have gay and minority friends whom they respect as equals. Conservatives need to change to attract decent numbers of young voters, and they are unwilling. Even "alienated" young people won't pull the lever to move backwards.
Fugudaddy- You don't get it. Of course I understand they showed up in 2012 and 2008. Why did they show up in 2012 and not in 2000? You have no answer. Did something magical happen and that today's youth are more sensible than those in 2000? Seriously, what is your explanation?
My thesis is they showed up in 2008 for the history of it, and the Obama operatives knew that the historical pattern would be that they would be no shows as in a more typical presidential campaigns. The Obama campaign mobilized, using technical means to make sure the youth vote turned up.
That youth vote did not show up in 2010, nor will it show up in 2014 for the mid terms when 20 Democratic Senate seats will hang in the balance.
Just as important as the turnout- and something Benen skipped over- is that the Youth vote for the Dem candidate is not reliable. The youth don't vote Dem when the Dems field "Bush lite" Democratic Leadership Council candidates. Look at the facts for the voters aged 18-29. So it is a collective delusion on the Left that the Youth vote is a de facto Democratic party. They must be courted. In 1996, Clinton won only 54% of the youth vote, same for Kerry in 2004. the GOP won the youth vote in 1984 and 1988. (source) So don't expect Clinton II to claim a majority of the vote against Christie in 2016 unless she makes a clean break from her husband's neo conservatism.
As for the overall percentage of the vote? For 18-29 year olds Look look look at the facts.
1996, 2000, 2004: 17% (same source)
2012: 19%
What would America have looked like if the Gore campaign delivered 60% of the youth, and they were 19% of the electorate? The smug attitude towards the youth vote among Demo political operatives was ill advised- Tipper Gore's war on Rock was not helpful.
That's right. No Iraq war. No decade long quagmire in Afghanistan. No 2008 meltdown due to an unregulated Wall Street. A security apparatus that kept its focus on Al Quaeda, perhaps detecting and preventing 9-11. Real progress at confronting Climate Change.
You know, sane US policy.
The difference is that Obama understood that the Youth vote is an underappreciated block and can power progressive candidates. His OFA operation was able to engage this constituency and deliver those in agreement with the Presdent to the polls.
My warning was that this was a technical victory. In the arms race of electorale technology, the OFA genie is out of the bottle and can be used by conservatives just as effectively as the progressives used it.
The only question is whether the presidents and progressives disarm or whether they will escalate use of this new weapon to decimate the GOP. If history is any guide, the progressives will be complacent and go back to their video games and self indulgent apolitical ambivalence about the world.
That's why the Koch brothers, Wall Street and the plutocrats are simply biding their time. The expect us to go back to sleep.
As an 18 year old myself, I got really involved in the Obama Campaign because of the importance of this election. I can't see how Mitt Romney could have been at all appealing to a college student with loans, hoping to find a job four years from now. I don't know about my peers, but that's why I made it a priority to vote this year, as well as in 2014.
I turned 18 two weeks before the 2000 election, and I voted - I was so excited that I could, and went to my polling place before school that morning to cast my vote for Al Gore. (What a first election.) But the thing is, I was one of very, very few people I knew around my age who paid attention to politics. I was lucky in that I grew up in a very politically active family - I had met my senators and my representative by that age, my parents were very active in local elections, and we all watched the news practically religiously. I knew what my vote counted towards.
But for better or worse, most younger people in the 90s didn't pay a lot of attention to politics because they didn't have to. The Berlin Wall fell when I was in the first grade, the USSR collapsed, and the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction went away. The US wasn't involved in any major, longstanding foreign conflicts. The economy was booming. The most important political question when I was in high school was whether or not Bill Clinton had an affair with an intern. A lot of younger people didn't pay attention to politics in the 90s because they never really saw a reason to.
Then came 9/11. Then came George W. Bush. Then came the Patriot Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ever-increasing culture war. And younger people woke up. I'm not in that 20-29 group anymore (my 30th birthday was right before the election), but the fact stands. The current crop of younger people just pays more attention to politics than younger people did 15 years ago. And once people actually start paying attention to politics, they don't generally stop.
Today's young voters have grown up with a much clearer understanding that we all exist in this world together, thanks to social media and the internet. The Republicans are all about "me," but the kids know the real world is about "us."
I am so happy to be in the minority of my age group and to join with the youth in support of a more liberal and progressive society. suzette is correct that the old white men are not acting like they got any message about changing their evil ways. This just means we need to be grateful for the OFA organization keeping the youth engaged, to turn out to further the change agenda in 2014.
On an down note, the Ohio Supremes ruled 4-3 that the ridiculously partisan redistricting is constitutional. Which means we need to register more Dems in those red districts if we want to flip them to blue.
I chuckled when I looked at the graph and realized that I am part of the (only) 47% figure there.
@AJayne
Me too. Though 51% of our cohort voted for Mittens being part of the 47% of it who voted for Obama feels like I personally shot him a bird.
Yeah, I am still gloating. Where I live it pisses the vast majority off.
If GOP "leaders" were wise, most of the comments, legislation and disenfranchisement wouldn't have happened; but that also means there is actual "leadership & forward thinking" among the GOP! And that animule was slayed a long time ago!
it takes time for things like this to filter into the bubble (if they ever manage at all) and conservatives are trying to figure out how to make this fit with their version of the Universe.
They have been told for ages that "This is a center right country" and that we are a "Conservative nation". The thing is that by the time Gen Y is running the show the current age of social politics will look as quaint as a Norman Rockwell painting.
I think the problem within the GOP, is not that they do not realize the demographics of this country has changed. The Establishment knows this all to well, the inherent problem is, the uneducated base has yet to come to this reality.
The Establishment catered and pandered to the uncompromising, uneducated and evangelical parts of their base, for so long that. It's coming back to bite them in the rear end. Because they can no longer control those aspects anymore.
The Republican base is a walking oxymoron. They will scream that America is the Greatest Country on Earth. That people come here for a better life, then when election season comes around. They scream to take their country back from "them", the very same people they advertise came here for a better life.
But they have no one to blame but themselves. If you spend 20+ years creating this delusion of how America really is, and was growing into what it is today. You can't fault the base for not wanting to abandon that delusion.
Yet the GOP continues on in the deluded belief that this is a center-right, White, Christian country. I hope they continue their current antics, and bury the anti-book learnin' radical ideology with irrelevance once and for all.
At the rate the climate is disintegrating, I wouldn't bet a whole lot that when the present young voters reach retirement that there is still anything resembling our society around.
Though I've met my share of "young voters" who haven't fallen far from the TEA tree, I have some faith that most of the others have seen the light in the fact that women, gays, Hispanics, African Amercians*, etc. have just as much if not more legitimacy than John McCain and the Whitey McWhite-ington Cracker party.
Got to love the young, at least before they've been poisoned with toxic idealogies.. Today's youth have black, hispanic, gay/lesbian friends. The melting pot for the young has changed since Whitey was "growing up"!
The Republican Party seems to have absorbed too much of the vulture capitalist mentality of their biggest donors. They're uncompromisingly pursuing policy victories at the expense of long-term viability. They get away with it in the short-term because it's incredibly hard to undo the damage afterwards, and because it's quite lucrative for the rabble-rousers who can take their money and vamoose once the possibility of electoral victories peters out entirely.
The kids aren't alright! They're all right!
Who?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Are_Alright
The Magna Carta was forced on a king by a many who did not care to be ruled by the few.
Martin Luther and others protested (hence 'Protestant'), and many died in the belief that no privileged one or few should dictate how we worship.
The American colonials protested the 'Divine Right' of kings, the idea that a privileged few should rule the many.
Union organizers were jailed, beaten and killed for their efforts to unite the working middle class against a wealthy few who were unable to recognize the good business sense in providing adequate food, shelter, medical care, education and training for their livestock.
Don't despair that we have always had the Taliban/Teaparty with us, that they will always be with us. Remember that they are few, if wealthy, and rely on ignorance and confusion.
Educate.
The Republicans are facing a dilemma in having to choose the expansion of the party or their rich benefactors and the radicals. But they can't have both. It should be a no brainer to choose building a new coalition since the old one is disintegrating along with the message. However, the Republicans keep deluding themselves that they are still the majority and Obama is a fluke. This is based on their control of large numbers of local and state governments. When that starts falling apart, the Republicans will be in crisis and forced to change.