Maryland Juice recently noted evidence of potentially big political shifts on the horizon, and we speculated that many of these changes were being driven by generational differences. It seems everyday a new voice speaks out with a different angle on this thesis, so I decided to highlight three interesting pieces on this topic. Here are excerpts from Exhibit C:
The New Generation Gap (read full article)
MICHAEL CROWLEY November 14, 2011 - TIME
Alexandra Serna cast the first presidential vote of her life in 2008, for Barack Obama, with enthusiasm and hope. Three years later, the 24-year-old, earning a degree in accounting at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), still supports the President. But her optimism has faded.... While Serna isn't about to vote Republican in 2012, she hardly seems a sure bet to turn out for Obama.
...78-year-old Walter Levy has few kind words for the President. The Navy veteran, who voted for John McCain in 2008, grouses about the state of the country and its government. "We're going backward right now," says the Fort Lauderdale resident. "The government's gotten itself too involved in everybody's life." His wife Concetta, 77, is more blunt. "I don't like the President's policies," she says....
Listen to these three closely and you can hear the two Americas speaking.... But the deepest split is the one that cuts across all these and turns not on income or geography but on age. In the past few national elections, young and old Americans have diverged more in their voting than at any other time since the end of the Vietnam War, according to the findings of an extensive new Pew Research Center poll. The survey reveals that the youngest and oldest voters have strikingly different views on everything from the role of government to the impact of the Internet and suggests that the 2012 election could be one of the starkest intergenerational showdowns in American history, not just in Florida but coast to coast....
"...We've got the largest generation gap in voting since 1972," says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "Since 2004 we've seen younger people voting much more Democratic than average and older people much more Republican than average. And that may well play out again in 2012." Indeed, Pew's Generational Politics poll shows a yawning generation gap in a hypothetical matchup between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. Voters 30 or younger favor Obama 61% to 37%. Seniors over 65 choose Romney 54% to 41%. With Americans born from 1946 to 1980 (baby boomers and Gen Xers) almost evenly divided, the youngest and oldest voters stand in even starker contrast.
iPhones vs. IRAs
On one side are the millennial voters, meaning Americans born after 1980 who have come of age during the Clinton, Bush or Obama presidencies. Having lived through a period of dramatic social and demographic change, these voters harbor strongly liberal-leaning views about society and government. That's partly because the U.S.'s youngest voters represent change: about 40% of them are nonwhite. As a group they lean left on social issues--strongly supporting interracial and same-sex marriages by wide majorities. They believe government has a positive role to play even in seniors' lives. Millennial voters, like so many other Americans, consider themselves economically dissatisfied. And yet they believe, 46% to 27%, that life in the U.S. has improved since the 1960s, in part thanks to the technology revolution they have inherited....
Whiter, less plugged in and feeling much grumpier is the Silent Generation, Americans over 65 who reached adulthood between World War II and the Vietnam War. The Silent Generation was profiled in a November 1951 TIME cover story that described its members as hardworking but docile and detached from political protest. Now in their 60s and 70s, members of this generation are restive, as likely to believe that the country has gone downhill as millennials are to think it has improved. They're more conservative than the so-called Greatest Generation seniors, who are older, remember the New Deal, may have served in World War II and are steadily passing away....
Whatever the reason, today's seniors are nearly twice as likely as young voters to say life in the U.S. has changed for the worse, expressing that opinion 50% to 31%. They're particularly unhappy about social change, with only 22% saying a growing immigrant population has been a good thing and just 29% approving of interracial marriage. They're wary of the America that Steve Jobs built, dominated by new gadgets and technologies that many don't understand or use. Fewer than half of Silents--45%--believe the Internet has been a positive development....
Silent Generation members are twice as likely as millennials to call themselves "angry" with the government, and they trust Republicans more than Democrats on nearly every key issue. Obama appears to be a contributing factor in their discontent; they are the most disapproving of the job he's doing. How much of this disdain is a function of Obama's policies and how much is a comment on his background is anyone's guess. But some combination of the change he has championed and the change he actually represents is too much for some of these voters to accept. "There is this sense that comes out of the poll that Obama represents the changing face of America that some older people are uncomfortable with," says Kohut....
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