Vice: Democrats Are Doomed Unless They Start Listening to Millennials
Candidates may be tempted to court older white Trump voters, but that’s exactly the wrong approach

2017 is the year of the youth vote. From the stunning surge of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the UK elections to Ralph Northam’s victory in Virginia, the power of young voters to influence political outcomes is increasingly clear. It is often absurd to speak in terms of “generational ethos,” but the cohort that voted so strongly for Labour in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US do have shared memories. Coming of age during a cataclysmic recession caused by the excesses of the 1 percent, millennials have experienced a political system that prioritized assets over human beings. They’ve watched as failures of the elite class resulted in the further accumulation of wealth in the hands of the ruling class, even while pundits declared that the system worked.

The Boomer generation, secure in the post-war welfare state, felt no compunctions pulling up the ladder. They voted for white supremacists devoted to the destruction of the social safety net while secure in the knowledge that their own healthcare would remain cheap—and indeed, Medicare has not been threatened by the Republican Party like Medicaid has. Yet despite the clear leftward lean of young people, caused in no small part by the Great Recession, pundits have frequently overlooked their electoral power, and too many Democrats still don’t know how to energize them.

Starting in 2004, American political parties began diving across age lines, meaning that low turnout among young voters increasingly spells doom for a Democratic candidate. For all the analysis below, I use two-party vote share of presidential elections (meaning excluding third-party voting) using American National Election Studies (ANES) data. That data points to three eras of age polarization in voters by age. Between 1952 and 1972, the average difference in Democratic performance in between those aged 18-34 and those 65-plus was 9 percentage points (Democrats won, on average, 51 percent of the vote among those 18-34 and 42 percent of the vote among those 65 or older). In the ‘60 and ‘64 elections, there were 13- and 17-point age gaps, respectively. In the ‘72 election, the gap was 12 points.