The current era of age polarization is unusual

In the recent past, young people were no more liberal than seniors

Polls seem to show Donald Trump making significant inroads with the youngest cohort of voters, which strikes a lot of people as odd since the youth vote has been so reliably Democratic in recent cycles.

The result can perhaps be made a little more comprehensible with a reminder that the youngest cohort of voters in the 2024 cycle comprises different people than those inn previous cycles, simply because of the linear progression of time. If you were in the 18-29 age bucket back during the 2016 campaign, you are now somewhere between the ages of 26-37. Which is just to say that most of Hillary Clinton’s youth support is no longer in the youth cohort. I qualified as an Obama-loving youth voter in 2008 (there were a lot of us), but I’m now a middle-aged dad who has a lot of conversations with other middle-aged people about real estate and middle schools. Anyone who can remember Rock Against Bush is now old, and lots of people who are now young were children when what we euphemistically call the “Access Hollywood Tape” came out.

If you were 12 in 2016, your parents probably weren’t eager for you to hear it.

This is one reason I think leading Democrats are mistaken to be so passive about Donald Trump’s felony conviction. It’s an opportunity to re-acquaint the electorate with a vast litany of scummy behavior that was maybe overdone in the 2016 cycle, but is still worth introducing to people who’ve never heard it.

But a broader point I want to make here is that while the 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 cycles all featured a pronounced age gradient in voter behavior, this is not a law of nature.

Winston Churchill famously quipped that “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 45, you have no brain.” This quote is, like many supposed Churchill quotes, seemingly fake. But nonetheless it has influence the common belief that it’s normal for young people to be left-wing and then become more conservative as they age.

The prevalence of this belief is exacerbated by the conservative movement’s tendency to embrace and elevate defectors from the left more robustly than the left does the reverse. The right defines itself primarily in terms of defeating the left, so ex-leftists like Whittaker Chambers play a prominent role in the history of conservatism. Conservatives like the joke that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality, which again suggests that progressive politics is a matter of naiveté that people are likely to grow out of as they age.

The campus radical movements of the 1960s are a big deal in American cultural history, and that was obviously a youth movement. Less noted, though, is that while anti-war youth were unusually vocal about their opposition to the war (they were, after all, the ones at risk of being conscripted), young people were more pro-war throughout the 1960s. In 1972, George McGovern did least-bad with voters under 30, but he did lose them. And in 2000 — the first election I voted in — old people were slightly to the left of young people.

In other words, there is no guarantee that youth will be left-wing or even that they will be more left-wing than senior citizens. It depends on cohort life experiences, it depends on which issues are salient at any given time, and it depends on shifting demographic factors.

The era of stark age polarization we’re living through is unusual, and I think it’s had a distorting influence on politics, and society, beyond the presidential election results.