Fifteen years ago, a new generation of young voters propelled Barack Obama to a decisive victory that heralded a new era of Democratic dominance.
Fifteen years later, those who were once young voters are not so young, and not so democratic.
In the 2020 presidential election, voters who were 18 to 29 years old in 2008 supported Joe Biden by 55 percent to 43 percent, according to our estimates, a margin about half of what Mr. Obama was 12 before that.
Exit polls show it even closer, with Biden winning by only 51-45 among voters who were 18-27 in 2008 (exit polls report results between 30-39, not 30-41 , the group that was between 18 and 29). in 2008).
And last fall, young voters in 2008, then 32 to 43, favored Democratic candidates for Congress by just 10 points in Times/Siena polls.
This shift to the right among the young voters who propelled Obama to victory 15 years ago is part of a larger pattern: Over the past decade, nearly every cohort of voters under the age of 50 has shifted toward on the right, according to an analysis of thousands of people. of archived survey interviews at the Roper Center.
It’s not necessarily a surprising finding. Political folklore has long held that voters become more conservative as they age. But he nevertheless disagrees with a wave of recent reports or studies that suggest otherwise. The Financial Times, for example, he wrote that “millennials are breaking the oldest rule of politics” by not moving to the right as they age. Similarly, Democratic data firm Catalist found that Democrats essentially haven’t lost land among millennials and Gen Z over the past decade. These findings have helped spark a new wave of speculation about whether the long-awaited era of Democratic rule might actually be around the corner.
But a different story emerges by tracking the same cohort of voters over time, rather than an entire generation with changing composition. Millennials in 2008 are not the same as 2016, for example: Six additional years of even more Democratic millennials were eligible to vote after the 2008 election, canceling out the slight Republican shift among millennials bigger.
The shift to the right appears greatest among older “young” voters — older millennials who came of age in a very different political era than today. Many of the issues that drew young voters to the Democrats in 2004 or 2008, such as the Iraq War or same-sex marriage, may no longer be issues. Republicans may even have reversed their earlier disadvantage on some issues, either by sometimes opposing foreign intervention, winning over some voters with color-blind messages about race, or becoming the “anti-establishment” party.
By contrast, the shift to the right is more modest among younger voters, especially those who came of age after Mr. Obama, in the era of Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders campaign and Donald Trump J. Trump. Politics today is still largely defined by the same issues that brought those voters to the Democrats. As long as that’s true, maybe they’ll stick around.
It is possible, even likely, if Mr. Trump is the nominee, that the 2024 presidential election will be fought over issues similar to those of the last election. If so, it could turn out to be like the 2012 presidential election, a fleeting moment of political stability that allowed gradual demographic and generational shifts to appear to carry the day. It may not last long.
