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: 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: How old is the average “strong Democrat” or “strong Republican”? This is a better approximation of the pool from which congressional candidates may be drawn. We’ve presented this data below, dating back to 1972, and aggregating different years of the General Social Survey under the president who was serving at the time. ( Since the General Social Survey groups all respondents 89 or older into the same bucket, we used actuarial tables to estimate how old nonagenarian voters actually were.) Republicans follow a v-shaped pattern: