Since the late 1960s, the same chorus has been heard from election to election: The young don’t care. They’re disengaged. They’re too wrapped up in their music, their favorite sports and their parties to take an interest in politics. Predicting that the young will vote in large numbers is like saying the Cubs will finally win the World Series. As it happens, the Cubs are doing well this season, and the evidence is overwhelming that this year the young really will vote in large numbers—and they just might tip the election.”
—E.J. DIONNE, THE WASHINGTON POST, JULY 25, 2008*
This year, 66% of those under age 30 voted for Barack Obama making the disparity between young voters and other age groups larger than in any presidential election since exit polling began in 1972.
—PEW, NOVEMBER 12, 20081
Let’s dispense with what we already know is going to be the Limbaugh-Wolfowitz-Horowitz-O’Reilly-Colbert answer to this chapter. It’ll go something like this: being a Democrat is an indulgence of youth, because you haven’t paid taxes and you haven’t seen the real world, but we love you, we forgive you, and we will embrace you into the pro-war, anti-environment, low-wage culture warriors when you inevitably age and wise up. They’ll claim youth have always been more Democratic than older voters and point to the 1960s, to how many of them were liberals who later saw the light. But these turncoats are the exception, not the rule.
One thing they can’t argue with is how diverse this generation is. Even Rush would have to admit that certain groups, regardless of age, tend to vote Democratic. Like African-Americans and Latinos, minus Cubans. That’s something we can all pretty much agree on. (That’s the only way I can understand how bad the Republicans are on minority issues—they know those votes are lost anyway.)
In light of this fact we can both agree on, there’s more bad news for Republicans. The generation of young adults voting in 2008 is the most diverse in history. Back in 1972, almost nine in ten youth voters (87 percent) were white. By 2004, only 62 percent of youth said they were white. The percentage of the youth population that identifies as Latino more than doubled during that time, from 5 to 12 percent.2 The trends in voting among these diverse groups favor the Democrats.
Now we’ll get to the more controversial part. That’s when we have to ask these folks telling us that being a Democrat is a symptom of being young, is voting behavior really that flexible? Do people just switch parties, stop giving a damn about schools and civil liberties, as soon as they pull out their checkbook to pay taxes?
In a word, no. This theory of voter behavior has about as much supporting evidence as creationism. People have actually gone out and researched these things. All these right-wing people are dead-ass wrong. Allow me to steer you toward a word that drives them all crazy: science.
The research is on our side. Psychology says that people’s political attitudes stabilize as they age. Once people reach their thirties, their political ideology is more or less set.3 Political scientists studying trends and patterns and so on concluded that “It is apparent…that identification with political parties, once established, is an attachment which is not easily changed.”4 There’s also the fact that the National Election Studies in the 1950s and 1970s agreed that “Party identification was the most stable attitude measured…indeed almost perfectly stable.”5 Studies in the 1990s confirmed these findings, showing that once voters’ party identification is set, it tends to stick.6
Another item of evidence for their consideration is the fact that the gap in party identification among young people has rarely been so dramatic as in 2008. To revisit a point made in an earlier chapter, the fact is, Democrats had a 19-point advantage among young voters. In 2004, the Democrats had only a 2-point advantage in party identification.7 In any other year, Republicans might be able to dismiss their disadvantage among young voters with the oft-repeated claim that youth simply tend to be more liberal than their parents, but this year they’ve got 19 points to explain away.
What’s worse news for the Republicans is the fact that youth didn’t just vote for Obama last year—they volunteered, knocked on doors, distributed pamphlets, and drove other people to the polls. That’s the type of investment in a candidate and party that cements political leanings. To go back to Curtis Gans of American University, “the more important contribution of the college-educated young was in providing the sinew for Obama’s extensive grassroots organization which was, in part, responsible for the large increase in Democratic turnout.”8 This spring 75 percent of youth are following the Obama administration and politics writ large closely or very closely.9
There’s a window in which voters’ major political attitudes form, and for this youngest voting generation, that window was the George W. Bush administration. Bush’s greatest contribution to the country may have been making sure that there’s no chance any Republican will be elected again while this bloc of voters has any say. One of these political scientists studying young voters wrote: “All the research done on the dramatic Democratic realignment of the 1930s shows that the key was young voters, coming of age as the Depression hit, influenced deeply by the contrast between Hoover and Roosevelt…those young voters became lifelong Democrats.”10 Asked how they were likely to vote in 2010, in the midterm elections, young voters were 53 to 31 percent in favor of a Democratic candidate over a Republican.11
The Bush administration brought us the war in Iraq, the chaos after Katrina, pervasive corruption, and a recession. Those were the events that defined the Republican Party for these young people. The fact that youth are overwhelmingly Democratic is no surprise. It’s more surprising to me that there are any young people out there who are Republicans. For their part, the Republicans know they’re in trouble, and they’re sweating the youth vote. They want it back.
Now that I’ve gone through the psychologists’ and political scientists’ opinions, let me give my Carville commonsense take on the youth vote. In television terms, the new “key demographic” is younger people. All advertisers really give a shit about these days are those under forty-nine years old. It’s this younger demographic in particular that they’re obsessed with. Advertising rates and as a result network profitability are almost exclusively driven by the ability of a show to attract younger viewers. Are these advertisers idiots? Or is there actually a reason behind this?
I would suggest that there’s a reason behind it. Older people are already set in their purchasing habits and, to be depressingly frank, they’ve got less time left to purchase. Young voters, to be equally brutally frank, can still be influenced, and it doesn’t take an actuary to figure out that a twenty-five-year-old is likely going to vote in more elections in the future than a sixty-five-year-old.
We can think of the choice between parties in economic terms. Let’s say you want to buy into a company, so you commission a study to see who is buying that company’s product and what the consumer base would mean for long-term growth for that company. That’s the type of cold, hard decision that people have to make every day. Well, look at the Republicans. The prime consumers of their product, or their ideology, belong to shrinking demographics, which is to say that, as a company, the Republican Party is headed for bankruptcy. Republicans’ consumers, or supporters, are rapidly shrinking as a market share, leaving the Republicans without anyone to buy what we’ll politely call “products” here.
As simple as this may sound to you, dear reader, you never can be too simple on the chance that some right-winger might pick this book up and read it. These many paragraphs are a laborious way to get to the central point, and that is simply this: the biggest political story unfolding in U.S. politics today is the ongoing collapse of the Republican Party among young voters.
The negative events and policies Republicans have been responsible for over the last eight years were the formative experiences today’s youth cite as the equivalent of JFK’s assassination in mine: the war in Iraq, the 2000 election in Florida, and Hurricane Katrina. They’ve given youth, as Obama would say, a sense of the urgency of now.
Youth Issues
To win young people, you have to be on the right side of three things: the economy; the war in Iraq; and the environment. The economy is one of young people’s top concerns.12 That’s not exactly what we might call shocking. Young people looking for jobs can’t find them. In the summer of 2008, this country had the highest teenage unemployment rate it’s had in sixteen years—20.3 percent.13 Moving from teenagers to all young people, that’s usually anyone eighteen to twenty-nine, it’s just one in three who thinks they’ve got a chance at a good job.14 That’s frightening.
Now on to the environment. This youngest generation of voters will inherit every one of our current environmental problems magnified by a thousand unless we do something drastic now. Say you’re twenty-four. You have to inhabit the planet, on optimistic average, for another sixty years or so. So, logically, you’re going to tend to be more concerned with the environment, global warming, and energy independence than most voters in other age groups. You have a bigger stake in it than an older person.
Being concerned about global warming is not, as the right-wing pontificators would claim, an indulgence of youth or a perceived problem that’s being drilled into your head by a bunch of pinko left-wing college professors, nutty columnists, and talking heads. You’re a rational person. You know it’s getting hot. You know it from empirical evidence, and you know it because, well, it’s getting hotter. If you’re twenty-four, you know it’s hotter now than it was when you were fourteen.
So, do young people believe that conservation is merely a personal virtue, as Dick Cheney declared so famously?15 Do they believe that it’s a good idea, as President Bush does, to allow coal companies to blow the tops off mountains and let the refuse slide down into the valley? (God knows one thing we have too many of in the United States is mountaintops. We could all do with fewer of those.) No, in short, young people believe conservation is necessary, not optional, and they want to protect the environment—not trade it in for a quick buck.
And lest I forget, there’s another issue, besides the Bush economic and energy policies crippling our young people, that will continue competing for their attention in 2009. That would be the war in Iraq. It’s mostly young people dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s young people who would be drafted pretty soon if we “stay the course” with the current rate of recruitment and retention. It’s also young people who are going to inherit the ravaged domestic economy and international relations nightmare that the Republicans have created with the invasion of Iraq. The amount approved to date for spending in Iraq as I write could have paid for scholarships for more than 101 million Americans to go to college for a year.16
The economy, the environment, and Iraq: check, check, and check. The Democrats are on the right side of all these issues that are going to matter to youth. But it’s not enough just to be right in 2008. Democrats have to make sure that youth’s identification with the Democratic Party remains stable throughout their lives. That means Democrats can’t just be the alternative to Brand R—or just get out the vote in 2008—we have to be a strong, appealing Brand D to solidify the gains we’ve made in this generation. Keep reading to The Real Deal for a “how-to” on building a strong Brand D.