How Our Political Identities Form

When you were born has a huge impact on your politics:

A new model of presidential voting suggests President Obama’s approval rating — currently in the low 40s — will inform not only the 2016 election, but also the election in 2076. The model, by researchers at Catalist, the Democratic data firm, and Columbia University, uses hundreds of thousands of survey responses and new statistical software to estimate how people’s preferences change at different stages of their lives.

The model assumes generations of voters choose their team, Democrats or Republicans, based on their cumulative life experience — a “running tally” of events. By using Gallup’s presidential approval rating as a proxy for those events, Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist, and Andrew Gelman, a political scientist and statistician at Columbia University, were able to estimate when political preferences are formed.

Leonhardt wonders whether today’s impressionable youngsters will skew conservative:

Some political analysts believe that teenagers are already showing less allegiance to the Democratic Party than Americans in their 20s, based on recent polling data. My own sense is that their argument rests on small, noisy sample sizes, and Mr. Taylor, of Pew, is also skeptical. The larger point, however, remains: The Democrats face challenges with today’s teenagers that they did not face with today’s 25- or 30-year-olds.

By any measure, Mr. Obama’s second term lacks the political drama of his first, when Democrats were passing sweeping legislation and the Tea Party sprang up in reaction. But the generational nature of politics means that the second Obama term still has enormous political import.

Dreher reflects on how his politics have shifted over time:

For me, the ages of 14 to 24 corresponded to the years 1981 to 1991 — the Reagan/Bush years. It was during that time that the feel-bad 1970s were dispelled (the first significant political memory I have was the Iran hostage crisis), and the Cold War concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The liberalism of that era was thoroughly ossified and reactionary. John Paul II was at the height of his influence, and that did a lot to bring me into the Catholic Church.

What shattered my faith in my 1980s conservative worldview were three things that happened in the 2000s: the Catholic sex abuse scandal, the Iraq War, and the financial collapse. These things happened from 2002 – 2008, a period that takes in ages 35 to 41. The connecting thread of these three events is how they all destroyed my belief that the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party could be trusted to exercise sound judgment — on moral matters for the Church, and on social, economic, and foreign policy matters for the GOP — and strong leadership.