There’s a phrase attributed to Winston Churchill (although historians have found versions of it going back to the 1870s) that goes like this: “if you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.” Those who invoke this sentiment usually intend it in a prescriptive sense, browbeating older liberals for their supposed immaturity. But there is also an extent to which the phrase could be read as descriptive, pointing to a tendency for younger people to be more liberal, and and then shifting to a conservative mindset as they grow older. In the upcoming presidential elections, we may see that conventional wisdom bucked for the first time in decades, with some polling data indicating that Gen Z may be skewing for Donald Trump, while boomers could offer Kamala Harris a “silver wave.”
In 2023, polling from the nonpartisan research firm PRRI showed that White teenagers in Gen Z were more likely than their adult cohorts to identify as Republican than Democrat. When it comes to political ideology, teens were also more likely to identify as conservative than liberal, again cutting against the trend among Gen Z adults. Affiliation to a party or political ideology was low, however, with nearly every category of race and gender labeling themselves more as “independent” or “moderate” respectively – the lone exception was teen White males, who identified as conservative in greater numbers than either moderate or liberal, and as Republican nearly as much as Independent. A poll by SurveyUSA from August of this year also pointed in the same direction, showing Trump leading by four points against Harris, 50%-46%. The gender gap in the data does match with recent election results beyond our borders, as young men were key to recent conservative victories in Argentina and South Korea.
Turning our attention to the boomers, there’s data indicating a generational reversal in the other direction. A series of polls across multiple states, from Arizona to Vermont, has shown Kamala ahead by varying margins with voters over 60, while a national poll from Fairfield Dickinson University conducted at the end of last month found Harris leading by a whopping 16 points with people over the age of 65. Scholar and activist Bill McKibben, who founded a progressive outreach campaign for voters over 60 called Third Act, argued in Rolling Stone that this shift makes intuitive sense: “older voters come from the past – but the past they come from is changing.” He notes that the youth that defined boomers was characterized by “the apex of the civil rights campaigns, the rise of the women’s movement, the first Earth Day,” and they may be shifting as we continue to live through an unraveling of these policies. “We’ve lived with the freedoms of Roe v. Wade and the protections of the Clean Air Act, and it’s been disconcerting to watch the Supreme Court strip them away.”
Caveats abound, of course. The data can be very noisy, and the challenge of reaching Gen Z voters for their opinions is a well-known hurdle for pollsters, opening the possibility for unintended biases being baked into the findings. The SurveyUSA poll, for example, contacted its respondents via phone call which, by Gen Z standards, is not far off from trying to reach them via fax. McKibben, ever the scholar, also acknowledged recent data cutting against his own argument, citing a Washington Post poll showing Trump leading by two points among older voters.
Whether Churchill will be proven right or wrong remains an open question.
