Green qualified that distinction.
“If you look at the opinion profile of young people, you might be surprised at just how ideologically outcast this largely liberal group is,” he said. “There are certain issues on which young people take quite prominent positions – LGBT equality, for example – but on other issues this is not the case.”
This isn’t indicative of how young Americans’ political views are generally expressed, but there’s growing evidence that it’s a useful political view. Rather than aligning with a set of positions held by Democrats or Republicans, many young independent voters approach politics like a Spotify playlist: they pick out individual songs rather than listening to entire albums. Or, perhaps more importantly, they attach more importance to some aspects and less importance to others.
This is certainly an overly broad portrayal of both young voters and older supporters, but it is a useful way to consider Greene’s observations, which coincide with recent polls showing a growing rightward shift among younger Americans and with Donald Trump’s unexpectedly strong support among them.
Part of Trump’s support can be explained by the way the country has evolved since 2015. 18-year-olds who will be voting for the first time this year were 6 the last time the Republican Party nominated someone other than Trump for president. 29-year-olds were just 17. The world of Republican politics they grew up in was always one dominated by Donald Trump.
This is separate from broader shifts that appear in different forms and to different degrees in different data sets. For example, in April, the Pew Research Center released data showing a continuation of a familiar pattern in partisanship: from liberal to conservative as respondents get older.
But earlier this week, the Pew Research Center released the latest edition of its largest, most comprehensive national polling survey yet. NPORS is a benchmark polling survey that reliably captures responses using a variety of methodologies, including telephone calls, online contacts and direct mail. And an analysis of the data by The Washington Post’s Renee Bronner found a much more complex interaction between partisan affiliation and age.
The sample size included in NPORS allowed Bronner to select not only age groups, but also race and gender. The results of that analysis are presented below, along with some particularly interesting findings, which we explain below. The graph is easy to read: dark blue indicates Democrats, and light blue indicates independent respondents who tend to vote Democrat. Red bars indicate a similar relationship with Republicans. The labels on the left indicate groups such as age, race, and gender.
The highlighted parts of the graph are explained below.
A. Notice that while the total number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents remains roughly constant across age groups, the number of people who identify as Democrats increases dramatically with the age of the respondent: Fewer than a quarter of respondents under 30 identify as Democrats or Republicans. More than a third of respondents over 65 identify with one of the major parties.
Although not highlighted, just below the overall differences by age is a similar breakdown among registered voters. Partisan identification is more prevalent within this group of respondents, likely due in large part to states generally requiring partisan registration.
But we should not ignore the most important aspect here: young respondents are now almost evenly split between the two parties, something we have not seen in recent years. Much of this movement is happening among independents, a group that tends to align themselves with one party because they dislike the other. So part of the movement here may be due to independents changing their perceptions of which party they dislike, or the extent to which they dislike it.
B. Also notable is the lower partisan identification of younger black and Hispanic American respondents. (The number of Asian American respondents was too small to categorize them separately.) They are more likely to identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents than older respondents from these racial groups, but much less likely to identify as Democrats.
C. The gender and age group most likely to identify as Democrats are older women. This pattern of younger respondents being less partisan holds true across gender and age groups, with men generally being less Democratic than women. In fact, men of all ages are as likely or less likely to identify as Democrats than the youngest group of women, who are also the least likely to identify as Democrats.
Men of all ages are more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats, while the opposite is true for women of all ages.
D. The gender, race, and age group most likely to identify as a Republican or Republican-leaning Independent are young white men, who are more likely than the oldest white men to identify as Republican or Republican-leaning Independent, but less likely to identify as a Democrat.
It’s important to note that the sample size here is small, so the margin of error is relatively large, but this still differs from past polls of partisan affiliation by age.
When looking at gender, race, and age groups, non-white women are the most likely to identify as Democrats. White women of all ages are more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats. In this poll, the majority of white women under 30 identify as Republicans or independents who lean Republican. Again, however, the sample size is small.
Either way, the data supports the idea that the familiar pattern of young Americans moving dramatically left has, at least in recent years, been disrupted. If so, Greene likely identified one reason why: the size of young people’s liberal political identity may have been exaggerated. It’s also possible that young voters have become disgusted by the party they once supported, perhaps in response to the candidates and issues presented by the Democratic Party.
Renee Bronner contributed to this report.
