Younger voters strongly lean Democratic

What an odd time for Democrats.

Even as concern grows about the possible cost in November of the protracted fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, long-range trends continue to flow in the party's direction.

The latest dose of good news for Howard Dean and other Democratic leaders comes from the estimable Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which reports a huge tilt toward the party among younger voters. Here are the particulars:

"In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58% of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who identified or leaned toward the GOP. The Democratic Party's current lead in party identification among young voters has more than doubled since the 2004 campaign, from 11 points to 25 points."

Even more heartening for Dean, et al, is this perspective from the Pew Center analysts:

"Trends in the opinions of America's youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds. And that appears to be the case in 2008. The current generation of young voters, who came of age during the George W. Bush years, is leading the way in giving the Democrats a wide advantage in party identification, just as the previous generation of young people who grew up in the (Ronald) Reagan years -- Generation X -- fueled the Republican surge of the mid-1990s."

Indeed, among all voters, the Pew Center found that ...

51% now identify with the Democrats, compared to 38% who place themselves in the GOP camp -- a significant shift over just four years. The comparable Pew report in 2004 put the breakdown at 47% Democratic, 44% Republican.

The new Pew findings (which can be perused here) line up with actual registration numbers from various states, which throughout the primary season have been mostly favorable for the Democrats.

In North Carolina, for instance, the Raleigh News & Observer recently reported  that of the more than 140,000 residents who signed up to vote since the start of the year, 53% registered as Democrats, 37% as unaffiliated and just 10% as Republicans. Those sorts of figures could make a solidly Republican state in presidential elections more competitive in the future.

In Oregon, a swing state in recent White House contests, year-to-date registration has seen Democrats double their edge in the state, from about 70,000 to 140,000. Here was the lead on the (Portland)  Oregonian story on these numbers: "The Democrats are coming. And they are coming in force."

Even with a rich heritage of becoming crippled by internecine strife, can the Democrats manage to overcome these current advantages?

-- Don Frederick

Comments

[Kenneth Jones]

"Younger voters strongly lean democratic"... I have another headline: the sky is blue! This blog just lost any credibility to me.

[Ronald Loui]

You're darned right they're flowing blue.

When I was in college, it was just assumed that there would be anti-war protests. But something funny happened around 1980. A bunch of upper-class right-wing thugs -- athletes who weren't good enough to make the teams -- would run through the quadrangles and try to break up even the most optimistic and hopeful candlelight vigils. I was independent, so I believe I am a fair historian here. This ugly brown-shirt thuggery, it turns out, was the beginning of the Reagan era, the Meeses and Bennetts and the future Ashcrofts and Gonzaleses, Cheneys and Roves. One of them, a Harvard man, is even a Senator today, a Rhodes Scholar classmate I would normally be proud of, except that after campaigning on family values for years, he keeps getting implicated in prostitution scandals!

The pendulum has swung back. It's not just the adage, "if you're young and you're not liberal, you have no heart..." It's the obvious corruption of the country by right-wing game-playing and fundamental misbehavior -- corruption to the core. And part of the swing is based in the realization among church leaders that the environment really is an issue. And so is telling the truth and standing up for the meek and the poor on occasion.

There have been great Republicans, of course, and there will be again. My favorite right now is Judge Elbert Tuttle -- from the same high school as Obama -- who chose to be Republican because he was offended by the Southern Dixie Democrats of the 50's who didn't permit black people to join their party. How times change! Jack Danforth is still a good man who would have made a great President. Lugar, and other Republicans who join with people like Obama -- Dick Lugar is a great patriot. It's too bad that John McCain isn't as good as the media portrays him, but he's not so bad.

Still, I wouldn't expect the number of great Republican leaders to be increasing rapidly anytime soon.

The Dems are not well served by leftover Sixties liberals, as we have seen in this campaign season. The Republicans actually have a hell of a lot more purging to do.