Boomer Politics?

Gallup has been doing an ongoing series on the Baby Boomers;  Baby Boomers: The Largest Generation is “an ongoing series analyzing how baby boomers — those born from 1946-1964 in the U.S. — behave differently from other generations as consumers and in the workplace. The series also explores how the aging of the baby boomer generation will affect politics and well-being.” Frank Newport, Jeffrey M. Jones, and Lydia Saad wrote Baby Boomers to Push U.S. Politics in the Years Ahead.  It won’t surprise you when I write that we Boomers are not that homogenous of a group; in fact the article’s subtitle is “[b]aby boomers’ politics vary significantly by age.”

Baby boomers constitute 32% of the U.S. adult population and, by Gallup’s estimate, 36% of the electorate in 2012, eclipsing all other generational groups. Baby boomers have dominated U.S. politics on the basis of their sheer numbers since the late 1970s, when most of the group had reached voting age. Taken as a whole, baby boomers’ political leanings are slightly less Democratic than the adult population’s, perched between the strong Democratic orientation of the youthful millennials and the more Republican orientation of the older Greatest and Silent generations.

As I mentioned at the beginning we Boomers are not a homogenous group.  In fact the Gallup article describes their report this way:

The above analysis is based on baby boomers as a group — taking the average political views of Americans born between 1946 and 1964 as one broad population segment. Boomers, however, are not monolithic; their political preferences are actually quite different within the 19-year boomer age span.

Gallup’s large database of Daily tracking interviews allows for an examination of baby boomers’ party preferences in yearly increments. The accompanying chart shows the net Democratic identification for boomers at each age in 2013, defined as the percentage of those of each age who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party minus those who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.

The article also discusses the influences that go into a person’s party affiliation, including the possibility of “the political and social environment” at the time the person was coming of age. For the first third of the Boomers, the article notes (in no particular order), that was the time of Vietnam, hippies, Woodstock, race riots and more liberalized views of acceptable social behavior. For the last third of the Boomers, things were different: Iran, President Regan, changing economy, tax issues, and the U.S. role as a world leader.

Referring to these as “intra-boomer” differences, the article explains how difficult it is to accurately forecast the Boomers’ political preferences. The article concludes “[p]redicting the politics of the highly important baby boom generation over the next decade as the group moves into its senior years is highly speculative. But one thing is certain. Baby boomers, holding the distinction of the largest generation in the U.S. population, will continue to exert disproportionate influence over the U.S. political process for at least the next 25 years.”