Greg Mankiw's Blog: The Youth Vote and the GOP
While younger people have been marginally to the left since 2000, this last election was a complete blow-out in this demographic.
Greg sees a trend in a fairly non-representative sample of students:
These particular students told me they preferred the lower tax, more limited government, freer trade views of McCain, but they were voting for Obama on the basis of foreign policy and especially social issues like abortion. The choice of a social conservative like Palin as veep really turned them off McCain.I don't think this phenomenon is limited to Harvard undergrads. My own perspective as a 26-year old card-carrying Republican who just voted for Obama is the same - and its the same I'm hearing from my other friends who tend to be conservative on fiscal issues and libertarian on social issues. Its not just about abortion and marginal tax rates either, its other social issues like anti-gay marriage amendments, the (increasingly-global) war on drugs, and the war on terror that have driven us running and screaming from the Republican party.
We're optimistic about the future - we have more faith in our neighbors than we have in our representatives. So, the tactics of fear and xenophobia are not just ineffective, they have a repelling effect on our oddly libertarian worldview.
In the future, a socially liberal and fiscally conservative party will have a good chance to dominant popular opinion. In the meantime, we are likely to be disappointed at all the hope for change we've naively placed in Obama and Biden.
