Mon Dec 30, 2013 at 04:29 PM PST
How has your generation voted?
The Pew Research center has updated their terrific graphic showing how each generation of Americans have voted, relative to the rest of the country, over the last two decades:
As you can see, those who came of voting age under FDR, Nixon, Clinton,
Bush 43 and Obama have tended to vote more Democratic compared to the
nation at large, while Americans who reached majority while Truman, Ike,
JFK, LBJ, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 have leaned Republican.
Most cohorts have remained fairly consistent in their choices over time,
though that 1960s contingent—perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not—seems
to have grown more conservative in recent years.
One thing this chart doesn't show, though, is intensity of
preference. So Clinton kids like myself have typically gone for
Democrats, but by what margin? For that, you have to drill down further,
and Pew offers the example of our most recent presidential election,
the 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Head below the
fold for another compelling graphic.
The headline on Pew's chart here references the Kennedy generation,
thanks to the recent burst of interest in JFK on the occasion of the
50th anniversary of his assassination, but it offers data for all age
groups:
So as you can see, my gang, the Clinton Gen X-ers, supported Obama by 10
percent, second only to the youngsters who backed him by an outsize 22
percent. The only other cohort to pull the lever for Obama, as you might
have guessed from the first graph, is the Nixon group, though I suspect
that New Dealers did as well. (It appears there simply aren't enough of
them left, sadly, for Pew to study in a statistically meaningful way.)
The remaining four age brackets all went for Romney, as you'd expect,
though they, too, have different intensity levels as well.
The question, as always, is whether these patterns will hold as we
march toward the future, or whether they'll change. If they stay true to
form, as they largely have for some time now, that's good news for
Democrats, as the oldest Americans are some of the most conservative in
the nation while the youngest Americans tilt strongly blue.
While we're at it, take the poll below and let us know which generation you belong to!
While we're at it, take the poll below and let us know which generation you belong to!
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