"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Outlandish Josh

Published on Wed, 2006-11-01 18:25

The Revolution, Visualized

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Thanks to Juls and Mystery Pollster, here's a fascinating graph charting party-affiliation with age. I'm a bit suspicious as to how they're calculating for the 33%+ of people who don't self-identify with any party, but the overall visualization of the waves is awesome.

Quick takeaways:

  • The velvet revolution is at hand. In the coming decade a strongly GOP-leaning wave is going to expire as the most progressive generation in history comes on-line.
  • The GOP is good at politics. They've managed to build power without real majorities among the public. This is done through slick communications, driving up apathy among the general public while stoking their base, and by marginalizing Democrats among the power-elite so that there appear to be no clear alternatives.

But basically this means that the people want a progressive future and as long as we stay on target we'll win over time. My generation knows that politics matters and knows that the 24/7 cable newsmedia is not really a good source of information. I like our chances. Health care here we come.

Responses

Thu, 2006-11-02 00:42 — Sam Tresler

That this isn't a better representation of how people opinions tend to change as they grow older.

This would need to be an animated graph to truly indicate substantial change. It's no great revolution that 18-23 year olds are liberal.

I'm not saying that this isn't happening, just that this graph doesn't do justice to it. Its actually more of a poor representation of how people change with respect to their age - the same way you grow to desire a retirement plan and a nice house as opposed to a futon and a good cheeseburger.

Now.... were a graph or animation to overlay income, age, race, etc and have the digital ability to click on intersections I think that might reveal something, particularly if it could do any rough cyclical eaxtrapolation. i.e. low income political opinion is cycling in 8.25 year increments and hispanics are cycling at 3.4 years so we should push more in these neighborhoods.

I have a friend who actually does a lot of stuff, and it is scary the degree of precision that is reached about elections before they happen. literally, in most cases it can be called within 85% certainty. That was disillusioning.

Thu, 2006-11-02 00:45 — Sam

I'll use the preview button, instead of posting a second comment to clarify....

I have a friend who does a lo of stuff like this.

I actually have several friends that do a lot of stuff.

Thu, 2006-11-02 11:32 — Outlandish Josh

Read the link. While people and thus their politics do evolve over time, and it's highly likely that this peak wave will dampen somewhat, opinions arrived at in your early to mid 20s tend to stick.

The waves we're looking at here are 30 to 40% in magnitude. That's not people changing their core assumptions about the world back and forth a lot; those are generations.

It's far from certain that today's 14 to 29-year olds are really more liberal in any classic or cemented sense, and they clearly have little to no allegiance to any political party, but as a reflection of where the public is at, it shows a strong bent towards leftwing values is in our future.

If you could dial this graph further back and look at the wave that was on its way out in the 1990s, I think you'd see a peak wave in the midst of expiring as FDR democrats, those who came of age during the Great Depression, died off. I see that demographic shift is part of how the GOP came to be ascendant over the past 20 years.

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