… While it is tempting to view elections as being decided in the moment, much of the groundwork is set in place decades earlier. Looking at survey data from the 1950s, political scientists observed that voters who came of age during the Great Depression identified as Democrats at much higher rates than prior and subsequent generations. The Great Depression and the remaking of American government during the New Deal left a lasting imprint on a generation of voters. …
As a generation of New Deal Democrats grew older (and more likely to vote), they created a generational advantage that helped Democrats maintain majority control of the House of Representatives for nearly four decades. When Republicans finally retook Congress in the 1994 election, it too was a predictable consequence of a changing electorate: The New Deal Democrats had given way to a solidly Republican generation of voters who came of age during the early years of the Cold War. …
Once again, the nation is on the cusp of a generational revolution. As a group, millennials favor Democrats by nearly a 2 to 1 margin. Millennials are unlikely to trend Republican as they age so long as the current hyper-polarized political environment persists. However, they will become more likely to vote. (A general rule of thumb is that turnout increases by about one percentage point with each year of age.) This makes it possible to in essence fast-forward the electorate to forecast how the generational advantage will change over the next decade.
The Republican Party, after years of ascendancy, is about to fall off an electoral cliff. CONT.
Adam Bonica (Stanford), New York Times