Millennial voting shift bad news for the right

 

From The Guardian

Millennials are not behaving as expected. But what else is new? This time it’s their voting patterns and it spells very bad news for the Coalition [The right-wing coalition of the "Liberal" and the National/Country Party].

In Australia, the previous three generations – the silent generation, the baby boomers and generation X – all voted left when they were young, on average. Now the silent generation and the boomers, on average, vote right and gen X voting habits don’t appear to have changed much over their lifetime.

As they age, however, millennials appear to be going in entirely the opposite direction. Moving more to the left.

The trend where previous generations have moved right as they age, while millennials have moved left, is being seen across the English-speaking world. This is a big problem for the parties of the right as millennials make up an increasingly larger proportion of voters and it had an impact on the last federal election.

According to data from the Australian Electoral Commission there are now four electorates where those under 40 make up more than 45% of the voters in the seat: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Griffith. Griffith is an inner-city seat in Brisbane. Both Brisbane and Griffith switched to the Greens, which means the Greens now hold three of the top four.

The Coalition lost 18 seats and government, with almost all the lost seats in the major cities. The one bright spot for the Coalition was that they lost no rural seats. Rural seats are older. The 10 electorates with the smallest proportion of people under 40 are all rural seats (with the National party holding five of them). These are the seats that will see the slowest impact from millennials.

But even here the demographics are against the Coalition. Cities are growing rapidly, which means the proportion of city electorates is increasing, while rural seats are dwindling.

As older generations die out, millennials will increasingly come to dominate a larger number of electorates. If they continue to vote left, this will be catastrophic for the Coalition.

But why are millennials continuing to vote left as they age? There are probably three main reasons, and they are all linked to their economic wellbeing.

Insecure work

The first is the rise of insecure work. Whether it’s casual jobs, sham contracting, or labour hire, the number of insecure jobs is rising and younger workers are those most impacted. Millennials took the advice of their parents. They studied hard, with record numbers of them getting university degrees. But the secure well-paid jobs that were promised for those who worked hard have not appeared. In 2021 one in four unemployed people had a university degree.

While unemployment might be at historic lows, if the jobs are not secure then people are not able to plan a future. Wages growth has also been almost non-existent for a decade. Real wages, your wages after adjusting for increasing prices, have gone backwards over the last 11 years.

The economic deal of secure, stable and well-paid employment that was offered to previous generations has not been offered to millennials.

The Coalition is openly hostile to any changes in industrial relations laws that would make work more secure and give more bargaining power to workers. It was completely opposed to the recent modest changes to IR laws put forward by the Labor party. Further changes to try to reduce insecure work are expected to be brought forward this year. Millennials will likely be the biggest winners from these changes.

 Housing affordability

The second reason is housing. Housing gives families stability and security. Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister and the founder of the Liberal party, understood this. His government had a specific policy of increasing home ownership rates. Menzies believed that people were more likely to settle down and support their community if they owned a part of it.

Modern Liberals have a completely different view of housing. They see it as an investment, a way for people to make money. They have opposed policies that would make housing more affordable. Policies like scrapping tax concessions to property investors or large expansions to public housing.

Perhaps the Coalition hopes that as the boomers die off, they will pass down their expanded property portfolios to millennials, giving them economic security and hopefully switching them to vote conservative. But with average life expectancy now in the 80s and continuing to rise, many millennials will be into their 60s or older before they inherit.

Climate change

For previous generations, the existential threat was from nuclear annihilation and the cold war. The Coalition was successful in convincing many people that it was the party best placed to provide protection from this.

Today’s existential threat is from climate change and the Coalition is either ambivalent or in some cases openly hostile to action to prevent it. The impacts of climate change are now clear, and they are only going to get worse. Younger people will disproportionately bear the costs of inaction on climate change, so it is not hard to see why they are reluctant to vote for parties that are unwilling to act.

These three issues – insecure work, housing affordability and climate change – mean that millennials are sharing in less of the benefits of the economy and are less secure than previous generations.

The Coalition doesn’t have to do anything about this. But parties that ignore the concerns of important cohorts of voters are usually rewarded with extended time in opposition.

Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics

 From the FT

“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden). Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative.

The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.

Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass.

It’s not every day that concepts from public health analytics find a use in politics, but if you’re a strategist on the right, then now might be a good time for a primer on untangling age, period and cohort effects(opens a new window). Age effects are changes that happen over someone’s life regardless of when they are born, period effects result from events that affect all ages simultaneously, and cohort effects stem from differences that emerge among people who experience a common event at the same time.

This framework is used to understand differences in a population and whether they are likely to be lasting. This makes it perfectly suited to interrogating why support for conservative parties is so low among millennials and whether it will stay there.

Let’s start with age effects, and the oldest rule in politics: people become more conservative with age. If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.

On to period effects. Could some force be pushing voters of all ages away from the right? In the UK there has certainly been an event. Support for the Tories plummeted across all ages during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, and has only partially rebounded. But a population-wide effect cannot completely explain millennials’ liberal exceptionalism, nor why we see the same pattern in the US without the same shock.

So the most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

This is borne out by US survey data showing that, having reached political maturity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, millennials are tacking much further to the left on economics than previous generations did, favouring greater redistribution from rich to poor.

Similar patterns are evident in Britain, where millennials are more economically leftwing than Gen-Xers and boomers were at the same age, and Brexit has alienated a higher share of former Tory backers among this generation than any other. Even before Truss, two-thirds of millennials who had backed the Conservatives before the EU referendum were no longer planning to vote for the party again, and one in four said they now strongly disliked the Tories.

The data are clear that millennials are not simply going to age into conservatism. To reverse a cohort effect, you have to do something for that cohort. Home ownership continues to prove more elusive for millennials than for earlier generations at the same age in both countries. With houses increasingly difficult to afford, a good place to start would be to help more millennials get on to the housing ladder. Serious proposals for reforming two of the world’s most expensive childcare systems would be another.

UK millennials and their “Gen Z” younger cousins will probably cast more votes than boomers in the next general election. After years of being considered an electoral afterthought, their vote will soon be pivotal. Without drastic changes to both policy and messaging, that could consign conservative parties to an increasingly distant second place. 

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch

 I expect most people get more conservative as they age.  I have not: I used to believe in neo-liberalism, and now I do not.  I am more progressive than I was 50 years ago.

People aren't moving right as they age, any more

 From a tweet by Matthew Sheffield

Millennials aren't moving rightward as they've aged, unlike Gen X, Boomers, & Silents. This is a good piece on the trend, but it doesn't note that the WW2 generation had a similar left loyalty. The common factor? Both gens got screwed by oligarchs.

https://archive.is/20221230225501/https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4