Forgive me if this has been posed before, and pardon my colossal political ignorance, but this question has been nagging me for a while.
It may be a stereotype, but I think common experience is that folks on average are more politically liberal when younger, and become on average more conservative when they get older. (There’s a quote attributed to Churchill that goes something like “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, then you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re older, then you have no brain.” I like it – it sums up the situation, and manages to insult everyone. But equally.)
That being so, how did the generation of liberal Baby Boomers manage to only elect two Democrats, but Three or Four Republican Presidents (depending upon if you count Nixon)? How could the folks about my age (I was born at the peak of the Baby Boom, and Carter/Ford was my first election) manage to elect Reagan twice and two Bushes?
Please note that this question is independent of whether they should have, or of contending the results of the last election. But looking at the demographics, I certainly would not have expected three Republican vistories in a row.
Using the conventional definition of the Baby Boom as beginning in 1946, the “cutoff age” for Boomers in the elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988 was 34, 38, and 42 respectively. Given that lower percentages of young people vote, I’m sure that Boomers were but a small minority of 1980 voters and were probably still a minority in 1984 and 1988.
Also, I don’t have any statistics in front of me, but I think that both stereotypes–that Boomers are more liberal than other generations and that people become more conservative as they get older–are seriously overstated.
Yeah, baby boomers made a lot of noise in the 60s and 70s, but it was mostly to advance their own causes, which were, for most of them, self-serving, and therefore, conservative. Those who acted out or claimed a “liberal” youth (Viet Nam war-protesting, smoking pot, rock ‘n roll, etc.–are these “conservative” or “liberal” activities?)found it very easy to respond to the Republican stance once their 60s lifestyle was disowned. Plus they started to work and in many cases raise children, who they were going to make sure did not do what they, before becoming parents, did in their crazy “liberal” youth. And besides, all those hippies were really a minority. The freaks lost, the straights won. Thus is lowered even further the boomer percentage of voters implied in jklann’s fine post. Plus, most of the boomers’ parents are still alive!
I agree with jklann’s point that not all boomers (and certainly not all young people) are (or were) liberal. The most filmed and recorded boomers tended to be liberal, but there were a great many boomers who were quite conservative.
Beyond that, following the Nixon presidency, with all of its attendant scandals, the boomer generation was the first group to show a serious decline in voting. (The liberals among them would have been turned off by the disastrous McGovern campaign along with a serious perception that no amount of activism would change the entrenched politics in Washington or the state capitols, but lots of right-wing and middle-of-the-road folks simply gave up on government participation at the same time.)
Fellas, the “start date” for the Boomers is often given as 1946 or therea\bouts, but, as I say, the peak of the Boom was my birth year of 1955. As I’ve noted before, most Boomers, by far, don’t fit into the usual media picture of Hippies in the 1960s and Yuppies in the 1970s-80s. We turned 21 just in time for Carter/Ford in 1976. I’m not surprised Carter won in 1976 – there was severe backlash against Ford and against the Nixon legacy. But we Boomers were in our prime (20s and 30s) and in large numbers in 1980, 1984, and 1988, when Reagan got elected twice and Bush once.
I don’t believe that the Boomers ever were or ever will be the majority of the voters for any American presidential election. The standard definition for being a Baby Boomer is to be born between 1946 to 1964. In 1980, some of the Boomers couldn’t vote yet. The voters of the pre-Baby Boom would have been everyone from 35 up. So clearly no election before 1984 could have been a majority of Boomers. In 2000, the Boomers were from 36 to 54. I don’t think even then they would have been a majority of the voters. Remember, senior citizens vote and vote in large numbers. (And do I need to add that the majority of voters didn’t vote for a Republican in 2000?) So the only questions are about the elections of 1984 and 1988, since in fact the majority of voters (and probably the majority of Baby Boomers) voted for a Democrat in 1992, 1996, and 2000. Does anyone have any statistics about the age distributions of the voters in 1984 and 1988? Does anyone have any statistics about the age distribution of the Republican and Democratic voters in 1984 and 1988? Does anyone have any statistics (STATISTICS!!! not your vague feelings about the subject) about how liberal or conservative the Baby Boomers are compared with earlier or later generations?
However, you did not bother to vote. Speculation is that you inherited political cynicism from your older siblings and schoolmates, but whatever the reason, all boomers, ('46 through '64), have tended to have low voter turnout. (And we have still not established that “young = liberal” is more than a commonly held misconception.)
(Note that in the 1998 election, your 1955 group would have been near the top of the group from which only 35% voted while the older boomers were lumped in with the pre-boomers who do tend to vote more regularly.)
This Citizens for True Democracy site is advocating changes to the election process. Here they claim that the Federal Election Commision has been overstating the growth of the Voter Age Population and present graphs to show their “corrected” versions. Notably, the center graph shows voter registration falling off after Watergate.
Here’s a cite (best I can do): My wife is a doctor of psychology - she says that the generalization that people get more conservative as they get older is wrong.
I dunno, but ever since I could vote, we’ve had a series of the most god-awful Presidents imaginable. Ranging from war-mongerers (Johnson, Bush Jr) to crooks (Nixon) to people who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time (Ford, Bush Jr) to ineffectual nice guys (Carter, Bush Sr) to lechers with neither morals nor scruples (Clinton). It’s been a pretty dismal load.
I suppose some moderator will chide me because I should post this in IMHO or somewhere.