Our Liberal Future

Johnathan Chait has a new article on the Daily Intel blog about the future of the political parties in terms of how young people voted in the 2012 election.  He uses the Pew Research Survey's analysis of the youth vote.  It's encouraging for liberals.  Here are some excerpts from Chait's discussion:

"The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. [And younger voters seem to have a deeper attachment to liberalism than just the social issues, which] may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.

". . . the core of Americans’ political thinking [is] a blend of symbolic conservatism and operational liberalism. Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security. . . .

"But this is not the case with younger voters. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, voters under 30 say the government should do more to solve problems. More remarkably, 33 percent of voters under 30 identified themselves as liberal, as against 26 percent who called themselves conservative [in contrast to older groups who identify more as conservatives, when asked].

"What all this suggests is that we may soon see a political landscape that will appear from the perspective of today and virtually all of American history as unrecognizably liberal. . . .

"Obviously, such a future hinges on the generational patterns of the last two election cycles persisting. But, as another Pew survey showed, generational patterns tend to be sticky. It’s not the case that voters start out liberal and move rightward. Americans form a voting pattern early in their life and tend to hold to it. . . .  Republicans fervently (and plausibly) hoped . . .  [that] having voted for Obama and borne the brunt of mass unemployment, once-idealistic voters would stare at the faded Obama posters on their wall and accept the Republican analysis that failed Big Government policies have brought about their misery.

"But young voters haven’t drawn this conclusion — or not many of them have, at any rate. So either something else is going to have to happen to disrupt the liberalism of the rising youth cohort, or else the Republican Party itself will have to change in ways far more dramatic than any of its leading lights seem prepared to contemplate."

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This is very encouraging.  Although this makes sense, I still have doubts about the degree to which this can be assumed, and I think Chait may be overly generous in his interpretation of the second Pew survey he cites as support of people sticking with their liberal-conservative choices.   I'm from the generation that saw the South go from Democratic to Republican in very quick order when desegregation became the issue. 

Still, Chait's perspective is encouraging.

Ralph