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The Great Society, Reagan's Revolution, and Generations of Presidential Voting

We build a generational model of presidential voting, in which long-term partisan presidential voting preferences are formed, in large part, through a weighted “running tally” of retrospective presidential evaluations, where weights are determined by the age in which the evaluation was made. Under the model, the Gallup Presidential Approval Rating time series is shown to be a good approximation to the political events that inform retrospective presidential evaluations. The political events of a voter’s teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously important in the formation of these longterm partisan preferences. The model is shown to be powerful, explaining a substantial amount of the macro-level voting trends of the last half century, especially for white voters and non-Southern whites in particular. We use a narrative of presidential political events from the 1940s to the present day to describe the model, illustrating the formation of five main generations of presidential voters. *Chief Scientist, Catalist; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Columbia University †Departments of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University On November 6, 2012, Democratic President Barack Obama was reelected to the American presidency by defeating Republican Mitt Romney with a 51-47% margin, or, equivalently, by 52.0% of the two-party vote. Although this was an important and celebrated victory, Obama’s vote share was smaller than that of his 2008 election, in which he defeated Sen. John McCain with 53.7% of the two-party vote. The roughly 2 percentage point swing towards the Republican candidate was not enough for Romney to win the election, but it did reflect substantial losses for Obama among some sub-populations within the electorate. One group of particular interest is young voters, who were an important piece of Obama’s 2008 coalition. According to the exit polls, Obama lost 5 points among voters aged 18-29 when compared to the 2008 result1, a deficit that grows to 9 points when we look only at non-Hispanic whites2. The true swing among young white voters may in fact have been smaller than indicated by the exit polls3, but these data certainly suggest a substantial change over Obama’s first term. Why was there such a dramatic shift among this particular group of voters? And what impact might this change imply for future elections? We answer this question by not only examining this particular group, but by building a broader model of generational voting in American presidential elections. In the model, longterm presidential voting preferences are formed, in large part, by a running tally of retrospective presidential evaluations. Building from similar models developed by other scholars, we show that these retrospective evaluations are best characterized as a weighted average, in which presidential political events from a voters’ teenage and early adult years take on substantially more weight. The model accounts for a substantial portion of the macrolevel variation in voting trends of the past half century. We show that the 2012 shift among young voters was in no way arbitrary, rather it was indicative of a systematic trend in which political events disproportionately impact the political preferences of young voters, especially young white voters, and partisan presidential voting attachments remain relatively consistent over many subsequent decades. In short, Obama’s losses 1Obama’s two-party vote share was 67-33% in 2008 and 62-38% in 2012. 2Obama’s 55-45% advantage was flipped to 46-54% in favor of Romney in 2012. 3When considering margins of error around the exit poll estimates, along with some of the known difficulties in conducting exit polls, the 9 percentage point difference should only be considered a rough estimate. among young people were reflected in his comparatively poor presidential performance ratings leading up to the 2012 elections, and those lost votes are likely to carry to future presidential elections among this new generation of voters. The political preferences of young voters, and the formation of those preferences, have long been important areas of study within political science, sociology, and social psychology. Indeed, the study of “political socialization,” as named by Hyman (1959), touched some of the seminal works in American political behavior, such as The American Voter. For Campbell et al. (1964), party identification, which structures political attitudes and voting behavior, is formed early in life and is directed in large part by parental influence. Much of the early literature in the field continued studying young peoples’ preferences in this regard, often using panel studies of high school students, and sometimes of their parents, to identify the micro-level foundations of political attitudes and behaviors4. While the early studies began looking at macro-level implications of these micro trends, they were limited by the relatively short time-frames that their surveys covered—normally a couple of decades or less. For example, one of the features of the early data, circa the 1960s-1970s, was the observation that older voters tended to identify more as Republicans. Much ink was spilled attempting to disentangle whether this was due to aging, in which some social or psychological process pushed individuals towards a conservative viewpoint later in life, or generational effects, in which the shared life events of that particular birth cohort put them more in line with the Republican party. Crittendon (1962), using data over the course of 12 years, settled on a conclusion of aging effects, while Cutler (1970), Glenn and Hefner (1972), and others, with the benefit of additional data gathered over the subsequent decade, concluded that the relationship was a generational one. Eventually, scholars began to recognize the difficulty in fully disentangling age, cohort, and period effects, the last of which refers to specific short-term influences on political attitudes. The problem with this line of questioning is that one of the three effects is fully determined by the combination of the other two—if we could fully estimate cohort and period 4There are many extensive reviews of the early period, e.g. (Niemi and Sobieszek, 1977; Delli Carpini, 1989; Niemi and Hepburn, 1995). One book of particular note is Jennings and Niemi (1981), which summarizes many of their substantial contributions.