They Don’t Like Political Parties, Are More Liberal

NY Times/Catalist

They Don’t Like Political Parties, Are More Liberal

And Y and Z still vote!

There is a small movement among older Millennials towards Republican candidates and issues, as the GOP has always hoped. I suspect that this cohort has children, one of the greatest social forces toward conservatism. Younger demographics, without familial responsibilities, do tend to cling to more liberal principles, and the combination of higher education and liberal thoughts is less an expression of leftwing “indoctrination” than it is a more academic question of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated mythology. In short, education yields: critical thinking vs critical race theory. Still, the left and right fringes of the Y and Z generations evidence greater numbers of extreme political beliefs, but the vast majority are in the middle.

But as David Leonhardt, writing for the June 5th New York Times points out, this middle expresses its more liberal cast more out of fear than love: “Why? Many younger voters have become more politically active because they fear for the country’s future. Those on the left — who are a majority of younger voters — worry about climate change, abortion access, the extremism of the Republican Party and more. Those on the right worry about secularization, political correctness, illegal immigration and more… ‘What seems to be driving younger voters to the polls isn’t love, but anger,’ Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report has written.”

Sure, values like diversity and tolerance have a fear component, but they also reflect a lot more in post-secondary school education pools of individuals of all colors and gender persuasion. Hard to come down negatively on your friends and acquaintances; they’re not abstract strangers anymore. Additionally, to any student of history, “culture wars” (like the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”) never bring positive results and generally hurt (if not kill) a lot of innocents who simply cannot help being who they are.

Still, there is a mythology that younger voters are always more liberal than their parents and will eventually become as conservatives as the hippies of the 1960s who today vote Republican in droves. Leonhardt continues with his demographic analysis (supported by his cited statistics): “Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger voters throughout U.S. history have not automatically been liberal. In 1984, Americans under 30 strongly backed Ronald Reagan’s re-election. In 2000, they split almost evenly between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

“It’s true that people often become somewhat more conservative as they age (and millennials are following this pattern, as my colleague Nate Cohn explained). But the more significant factor is that generations tend to have distinct ideologies. People are shaped by the political zeitgeist during their adolescence, as research by Yair Ghitza, Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Auerbach has shown… Americans who came of age during the Depression and New Deal, for example, leaned Democratic for their entire lives. Those who grew up during the Reagan era (many of whom are part of Generation X) lean to the right. In recent decades, major news events, including the Iraq war, the financial crisis, Barack Obama’s presidency and the chaos of Trump’s presidency, appear to have created a progressive generation.”

Yet while older Americans tend to vote with greater regularity than do rising younger voters, the harsh reality is that they are dying off just as younger voters become more active in elections. This trend has been particularly pronounced since 2014. Fear among those younger generations has reversed the lethargy of young voters from prior decades, “In the 2018 elections — the midterms of Donald Trump’s presidency — turnout among younger voters surged. Almost twice as many people in their late 20s and early 30s voted that year as had done so in the midterms four years earlier. And they strongly backed Democratic candidates, helping the party retake control of Congress.

“At the time, it was not clear whether the newfound political engagement of younger adults would last beyond Trump’s presidency. So far, though, it has — and it’s emerging as one of the biggest stories in American politics and a major advantage for the Democratic Party.

“After each election, the data analysts at Catalist, a progressive research company, publish a post-mortem report based on months of analysis of election returns, voter files and other sources. A central theme of the latest report, covering the 2022 midterms, was that ‘Gen Z and millennial voters had exceptional levels of turnout,’ as Catalist’s experts wrote. In the 14 states with heavily contested elections last year, turnout among younger voters rose even higher than it was in 2018.” NY Times. Still, that does not mean that the Democratic Party as an institution remains an attractive organizational structure that Gen Y and Z love. The Dems win out on the issues, not in party politics.

But while rising voters increasing fall within that “progressive” side of politics, that is very much the opposite of the MAGA dominated Republican Party. Polarization on steroids. Having not lived through the post-WWII communist scare (and the “domino theory” behind the Cold War), these younger voters don’t understand the worry surrounding “creeping socialism.” So what? Indeed, as the Supreme Court begins to undo what younger generations believe were sacrosanct constitutional provisions – like access to abortion and preservation of voting rights – there is an increasing disdain, respect if you will, for our entire judicial system. Even as young college grads value government services as a career path, for many it is a desire to reverse conservative MAGA trends and to deal more realistically with issues like gun control… as gun deaths have become the number one killer of children and teens.

In the end, there is a very real question as to whether younger voters can unite and stay united as they get older to temper and minimize the polarization that many feel has made this country ungovernable. Before that nearly 30 million military assault weapons (out of 400 million guns) in American society create a violent solution that nobody really wants. The acceleration of guns, the legitimization of violence as a political expression, has now grown to a level where even anti-gun advocates are buying guns because they are surrounded by rather open and obvious gun ownership all around them. Let’s hope for the peaceful alternative.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is clear that rising Y and Z voters have come to the conclusion that whatever our government is right now, it cannot work without a ground-up restructuring.