Molly Ball asks “Has Obama Turned a Generation of Voters Into Lifelong Democrats?,” — and answers in the affirmative.
The under-30 vote went nearly as strongly for Obama as it had before: Obama got 66 percent of the under-30 vote in 2008 and 60 percent in 2012, the best youth-vote showings for any presidential candidate since 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18. Against the by-now-familiar backdrop of massive Obama rallies on college campuses, liberal youth might just seem like the normal order of things. But there’s nothing natural about it. Ronald Reagan came within a point of capturing the under‑30 vote in his 1980 presidential election, then won it by 19 points in 1984, giving the lie to the idea that kids are inherently liberal.
Now some Democrats hope Obama’s repeat success with young voters signals the arrival of a cohort whose members will vote Democratic for the rest of their lives. “These are voters who are in their formative years, politically,” Joel Benenson, the lead pollster for the Obama campaign, told me excitedly in the days after the election. “People frequently maintain the partisan identity that shapes their entry point into politics. What’s happening now is something people will hang on to for decades to come.”
Could Benenson be right? Has Obama turned an entire generation of voters into lifelong Democrats? The answer, according to political scientists who study partisanship, may well be yes. Voting for a party is a habit, they say, and the habit tends to stick. The Americans who came of age under FDR leaned more Democratic than the electorate as a whole for the rest of their voting lives. Many of today’s oldest voters—who broke for Mitt Romney by a wider margin than any other age group—cast their first, formative ballots in the Eisenhower years. And the Reagan era (spanning his 1980 election, his 1984 reelection, and the 1988 election of his vice president, George H. W. Bush) had a particularly marked effect on the rising voters of the 1980s. The Americans who entered the electorate during that time have remained disproportionately loyal to the GOP compared with voters overall.
Reagan turned a whole bunch of middle class young people into Republicans during the 80’s, and they kept voting for Republicans in the 1990’s and 2000’s, which is why those years were fought on Republican frames and issues even though the Dems managed to win in 1992, 1996 and 2000*. 1980 is considered by political scientists to be a realigning year, just as 1932 was. The reason why Democrats were able to win after 1980 was because Bill Clinton adopted Republican policies as his own and spoke about issues in a Republican frame. It is beginning to look like 2008 was a realignment election back towards the Democrats, but the Republicans have not yet learned their lesson to adopt Democratic policies as their own and speak in Democratic frames. They are still stuck in their old talking points and language, which is understandable. The Dems did not reinvent themselves until after they lost a third straight election in 1988. And I don’t think the GOP will do so either until they lose in a landslide to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Ron Fournier: “House Speaker John Boehner has stubbornly insisted he will not bargain with Obama one-on-one. He also says the House, after increasing taxes by $600 billion last year, will not raise new revenue.”
“Don’t believe him. Don’t mistake a negotiating position for reality. House Republicans tell me they are open to exchanging entitlement reform for new taxes — $250 billion to $300 billion, or approximately the amount that Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania proposed raising over 10 years under the guise of ‘tax reform.'”