DURING the 33 years since the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, politicians have largely ignored young voters. This is no great surprise. Politics 101 tells us that those who vote are those whose material interests are most at the government's mercy. Seniors, who depend on Medicare and Social Security, vote in droves. Young voters, on the other hand, stay home, as the government slowly nickels and dimes them.
Despite years of neglect, many believe that our generation can be enticed to become swingers -- in the voting booths, that is. Anna Greenberg even claims in "The American Prospect" that Generation Y can be as pivotal as the fabled "soccer moms" in swinging this year's elections ("New Generation, New Politics," Oct. 1, 2003.) To that end, besides MTV's perennial "Rock the Vote," there is now the "New Voters Project" -- an effort to register 260,000 young swing voters in six of the most closely divided states in 2000 (www.newvotersproject.org.)
With many pundits proclaiming another 50-50 split in the electorate this year, the question remains: will our generation swing, or will we be politically monogamous? To the dismay of this faithful Republican, conventional wisdom will probably prove correct this year, as young voters stand by their traditional party -- the Democrats. While once upon a time Republicans could have captured this coveted class, lately they have just been piling billions upon billions of public debt on the backs of young voters already burdened with personal debt.
According to conventional wisdom, "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." To that end, as a College Republican at Princeton, my alma mater, we strategically refused to help register students to vote. On two Republican U.S. Senate campaigns I worked on, we went out of our way to avoid college campuses. But following the conventional wisdom -- that Republicans should not even bother trying to woo young voters -- proved to be wrong. With a party that historically opposed Social Security and Medicare, we didn't do all that well at the senior centers either.
In fact, pitting the major concerns of seniors against those of youths would have created an issue matrix overwhelmingly favorable for the GOP at colleges. While seniors who draw from Social Security and Medicare would vote for New Deal and Great Society Democrats, young people who recognize the Enron-like accounting in those programs would vote for small-government Republicans. While seniors who want to re-import drugs from Canada would vote for price-control Democrats, young people who care more about legalizing drugs would at least not vote for them. (Mainstream Democrats tend to avoid this tricky issue; the most prominent drug legalization pusher recently was in fact a Republican -- former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.] And while seniors who want more services would vote for free-spending Democrats, young people who don't want to shoulder the debt would vote for Republicans -- the erstwhile deficit hawks.
Polls bear out these conjectures. According to a 2003 Zogby poll, a whopping 83 percent of those ages 18 to 29 favored the private investment accounts championed by Republicans. Predictably, those ages 65 and over showed the least support, 56 percent. (www.socialsecurity.org.)
A Pew Research Center poll last year also found support running 3-to-1 for the war in Iraq -- an effort identified with Republican hawks -- among those aged 18 to 29. Only 51 percent among those aged 65 and over supported the war. (Tyson, Ann Scott. "Antiwar views split along generation gap," Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 6, 2002).
Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the GOP has steadily become the party of the AARP. The $400 billion Medicare prescription drug pact between the two organizations last fall was the cherry on top of the smorgasbord of deficit spending the Republicans have binged on in recent years. And now that they are poised to cement their majority in the Senate -- with Democrats defending more open seats in the conservative South, Republicans have left Social Security and Medicare reform by the wayside.
Having been challenged twice, conventional wisdom now comes back poised to bite the Republicans' butt, as young voters look to the parties' positions and find their interests increasingly in sync again with the Democrats (although Howard Dean's knee-jerk appeasement of terrorists and dictators will be hard for patriotic youths to swallow).
The ubiquitous Larry Sabato, director of the University's Center for Politics, offers a differing analysis. In an e-mail response, Sabato said, "Recently, I've noticed that those under 30 are not differing greatly from the overall partisan breakdown of those over 30."
Sabato also noted, "A sizeable portion of the young who register do not show up to vote anywhere until years later."
As a Republican, I hope Sabato is right. But the party leaders have given young voters plenty of incentive this year to go out and vote for the Democrats.
(Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.)
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