The article makes a serious mistake when it assumes that taking a bunch of people of differing ages and mapping their political views can give you a lifepath that all voters follow. In fact, voters' political views tend to pretty much get set in their 20s and remain more or less the same throughout their life. Thus, the president that's in the Oval Office while you're in your mid-twenties more or less determines which party you're likely to belong to for most of your life. If he's effective and popular, you're more likely to belong to his party. If he's not, you're not.Pretty much
nless the GOP purges itself (and using the Tea Party to do so would be tactically great in the long term) they have major long term problems.Are you kidding? If the republicans dropped the 'baggers, they would go the way of the Whigs and the Bull Moose party. The idea that the republican and democratic party are destined to duke it out for all eternity is absurd. Parties die. They go away. And in particular, the U.S. is only 234 years old. It could easily become a one-party affair, or go multi-party, or whatever.
Seriously, I wish someone with some math/stats skillz would come in here and debunk some of this stuff.You don't need math to debunk this. It's just dumb. He's looking at data about people at certain ages, and assuming that it's all due to their age, and not when they were born But we know culture changes greatly through the years, while people's opinions don't actually change that much as they get older.
America is getting less white and less homophobic, that is pretty undeniable, we got a ways to go but it is happening.
Since Obama's election, the Republican Party has become more anti-immigrant, making the sort of bipartisan movement on immigration reform we saw in 2006 unlikely. Membership in the dubiously named House Immigration Reform Caucus, a nativist coalition whose initiatives have included an outright ban on all immigration -- legal and illegal -- has increased dramatically since the 2006 protests; for years it had membership in the teens, but it now includes 110 members. Republicans who once supported comprehensive immigration reform no longer do. For example, McCain's 2005 plan would have granted undocumented immigrants amnesty, but the senator has since backed down from the measure.Less homophobic:
One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and, in her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage—they were talking about discussions going on across the country—and my daughter Kate, after listening to it for about 20 minutes, said to them: "You guys don't understand. You've already lost. My generation doesn't care."-- Iowa Senate Majority leader Mike Gronstal
I just can't understand how anyone can support either of these parties...
This may be true for the individual, but not necessarily for the population as a whole. The idea that young people are more liberal than old people is older than dirt. To reiterate uncanny hengeman and intentionally misquote Churchill:That's because PEOPLE KEEP GETTING MORE LIBERAL. Someone born in 1990 is going to be WAAAAAAAAY more liberal then someone born in 1870!
Jabs at my age are always welcome, thanks!Get off our LAAAWN! *shakes fist*
The war in Iraq has never, not since Bush first proposed it, had the support of a majority of Americans.
Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935.(emphasis added)
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The article makes a serious mistake when it assumes that taking a bunch of people of differing ages and mapping their political views can give you a lifepath that all voters follow. In fact, voters' political views tend to pretty much get set in their 20s and remain more or less the same throughout their life. Thus, the president that's in the Oval Office while you're in your mid-twenties more or less determines which party you're likely to belong to for most of your life. If he's effective and popular, you're more likely to belong to his party. If he's not, you're not.
posted by EarBucket at 2:27 PM on March 30, 2010 [7 favorites]