Title: Both Republicans And Democrats Have an Age Problem | FiveThirtyEight
Headings: Both Republicans And Democrats Have an Age Problem
Both Republicans And Democrats Have an Age Problem
Content: They’ll need to be strong supporters of their parties’ agendas in order to win their nominations, rather than to take more heterodox views. The General Social Survey, which has been conducted periodically since 1972, provides for a more nuanced view of Americans’ partisan leanings. We collected data from it dating back to 1994, which is roughly when Republicans began to be younger than Democrats in Congress. In that survey, respondents are given a number of ways to label themselves, from independents without any partisan disposition to “strong Democrat” and “strong Republican.” It turns out that older Americans are much more likely to identify as strong partisans. Just 10 percent of those aged 18 to 29 identified themselves as strong Democrats in the sample. But the frequency increased with age, topping out at 23 percent for those aged 80 and older. The tendency to identify oneself as a “strong Republican” also increased with age, although the slope of the curve is a little flatter. By contrast, the number of soft partisans — Americans who identified themselves as weakly affiliated with one of the major parties — decreased with age. We can frame this data another way: