Fake America: The Next Generation

Via Ambinder, Patrick Ruffini writes:

the real story about the youth vote is not how many "new" voters Obama got to show up. It's how he produced a gargantuan 25% swing among existing young voters[…]

18 percent times a 25 percent increase in the Democratic margin equals 4.5 points, or a majority of Obama's popular vote margin. Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004's already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.

I think that this and my earlier point about the racial composition of the Democratic coalition are part of the same phenomenon. Younger age cohorts are dramatically less white than our elders. "Young voters" and "people of color" are two groups with a great deal of overlap. This just underscores the problems that Republicans have going forward. They face an electorate whose demographics are trending towards traditional Democratic constituencies.

But it gets worse for them. Typically, partisan leanings are set fairly early, and tend to lean towards whatever party is currently dominant (i.e., young voters have not traditionally diverged significantly from the rest of the electorate). During the Bush years, this link was broken (even more than with Dick Nixon), and young voters began to oppose the sitting president by wide margins, even as President Bush remained popular with older voters.

I do not expect that this pattern of opposition to the sitting president will continue. In fact, I expect that we will support President Obama more than older voters for the foreseeable future. Younger voters do not seem to have been animated by blind opposition to authority, but by broad support for more liberal policies (especially on social issues). Furthermore, Obama has made a conscious effort to appeal to younger voters, and has been rewarded with not just broad support, but extremely strong support. When he was elected, we were literally dancing in the streets, throwing impromptu parties, and engaging in unprecedented displays of emotional patriotism.

In elections to come, the Republicans will face enormous hurdles. They will be facing an entire generation holding liberal political views, who grew up seeing the Republican Party as the party of disasters and intolerance, who have a strong emotional connection with a Democratic President, a majority of whom are not white, and more than ever are not Christians.

But clearly, we are a "center-right" nation.