[ There’s a new demographic wave — a tsunami, really —
forming in the not-so-distant future that could finally break the
recent pattern of partisan gridlock. The youth cohorts growing up
right now are just dramatically different from their predecessors]
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YOUNG VOTERS WILL TRANSFORM EVEN THE REDDEST STATES  
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Ed Kilgore
April 21, 2023
New York Magazine
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_ There’s a new demographic wave — a tsunami, really — forming
in the not-so-distant future that could finally break the recent
pattern of partisan gridlock. The youth cohorts growing up right now
are just dramatically different from their predecessors _

These young Tennessee gun-safety demonstrators represent the wave of
the future., Photo: Seth Herald // New York Magazine

 

If you’ve been watching politics for a good while, you may be
forgiven for rolling your eyes when the idea arises that demographic
change is going to push the political system to the left at some point
not too far down the road. In 2002, Ruy Teixiera and John Judis wrote
a book
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Emerging Democratic Majority_ that projected a new left-of-center
coalition based on young and non-white voters and highly educated
“knowledge workers.” In 2008, a lot of observers saw that
phenomenon coming to fruition in the “Obama coalition”
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lifted the 44th president and a Democratic Congress to victory.

Then came the Republican landslide of 2010, and six years later, the
election of Donald Trump
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GOP trifecta control of the federal government. It turns out that
younger voters’ preference for the Democratic Party was a bit less
dramatic than expected, while Republicans boosted their vote to
unprecedented heights among non-college-educated white voters. After
Democrats showed some impressive strength among college-educated
white voters in 2018
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Republicans offset those gains in 2020 with better performance
among non-white voters
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and forth throughout this century it seems.

But as Ron Brownstein points out
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CNN, there’s a new demographic wave — a tsunami, really —
forming in the not-so-distant future that could finally break the
recent pattern of partisan gridlock. The youth cohorts growing up
right now are just dramatically different from their predecessors:

[P]eople of color comprise well over two-fifths of Millennials (born
between 1981 and 1996), just under half of Generation Z (born between
1997 and 2012) and slightly more than half the youngest generation
born since 2012. That youngest generation (sometimes called Generation
Alpha) will be the first in American history in which racial
“minorities” constitute the majority.

The transition extends to other dimensions of personal identity. The
Public Religion Research Institute has calculated
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while just 17% of Americans aged 65 or older and 20% of those aged
50-64 do not identify with any organized religion, the share of those
“seculars” rises to 32% among those aged 30-49 and 38% among
adults 18-29. In turn, while White Christians constitute about half of
all adults aged 50-64 and three-fifths of seniors, they comprise only
about one-third of those aged 30-49 and only one-fourth of the
youngest adults.

Gender identity and sexual orientation follow the same tracks.
Gallup has found 
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while less than 3% of baby boomers and only 4% of Generation X (born
1965-1980) identify as LGBTQ, that figure jumps to nearly 11% among
Millennials and fully 21% among Generation Z.

The collision of this wave with the older white Christian voters whose
representatives currently dominate red states couldn’t be much more
jarring. As Brownstein points out, pre-1965 immigration restrictions
have made today’s older population cohorts even whiter than you
might expect: “[N]early three-fourths of baby boomers (born between
1946 and 1964) are White, as are more than three-fourths of the
remaining seniors from the older generations before them.”

So you have a number of places where the most conservative portions of
the population are in power now but will be challenged eventually by
the most progressive portions of the population. As Brownstein says:

Kids of color already represent about half or more of the youth
population in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South
Carolina and Arizona and about two-fifths or more in several others,
including Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. In many of those states the
share of seniors who are White is at least 20 percentage points higher
than the share of young people.

You get a taste of the coming intergenerational conflict in red
states, Brownstein notes, from the recent incident in Nashville, where
the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature expelled two Black
members
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leading a youth-dominated protest against lax gun-safety laws:

In some ways, the generational tug of war between the brown and the
gray symbolized by the Tennessee expulsions represents the classic
collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object. In
this case, the irresistible force is the growth in the electorate of
the diverse younger generations.

There’s not much question which side of the generational barricades
will eventually have to give way. As the youth tsunami grows nearer,
Republicans may find ways to compensate for a while and/or to nibble
at the edges of the future majority coalition. But their freedom to
maneuver could be drastically restricted by the need to motivate the
existing old-conservative base to turn out in a fear-and-hate frenzy
to hold the tide, and then to utilize the political power they have to
thwart democracy wherever possible. It’s a dynamic in which the
extreme methods Republicans are using right now to stay in charge will
eventually boomerang, perhaps suddenly and with terrible force.
Suffice it to say that Republicans would be smarter to turn down the
temperature of partisan and ideological conflict to cushion their
inevitable fall when today’s kids grow up and start voting for
change.

_[ED KILGORE is a longtime political observer who has been a columnist
for New York Magazine Intelligencer [[link removed]]
since 2015.]_

* young voters
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* youth vote
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* 2024 Elections
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* Red States
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* Nashville Three
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* Democrats
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* Democratic Party
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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* Joe Biden
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* Donald Trump
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* demographic change
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