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Young vs. Old in 1984: Generations and Life Stages in Presidential Nomination Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

Paul Allen Beck
Paul Allen Beck*
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Extract

Amidst changing voter preferences and unexpected volatility in candidate fortunes, the 1984 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination contained at least one constant. From Iowa and New Hampshire through “Super Tuesday” and the middle round in big industrial states to the early June finale, voter preferences among the major contenders for the Democratic nomination diverged sharply by age.

Gary Hart enjoyed his greatest support among young voters, while Walter Mondale's strength was drawn from older voters, especially those over 65. The appeal of Jesse Jackson varied by age as well. Young blacks flocked to the Jackson banner. Older blacks, perhaps no less excited by the presence of an attractive black candidate for president, were more reluctant to follow, giving a greater share of their vote than did young blacks to Walter Mondale. Not since the protest candidacies of McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968 or the more successful insurgency of McGovern in 1972 has so much attention been paid to the contrasting responses of Americans of different ages to candidates for the presidency.

Popular accounts of the relationship of age to presidential choice in 1984 have treated these differences as indicative of generational conflict. The epicenter of the Hart constituency is located in the “Vietnam” or “baby boom” generation, while Mondale's generational home base has been placed among voters who came of age politically during the New Deal. The implication is that Mondale represented vestiges of the old Democratic New Deal coalition, whereas Hart was the candidate of Americans for whom the New Deal is only an historical footnote. Simply put, the 1984 Democratic battle commonly has been described as pitting the old coalition against the new ideas.

Type
Generational Politics
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Summer 1984 , pp. 515 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Anneliese Oppenheim for her assistance in preparing this manuscript and to my students over the years whose almost instinctive aversion to establishment candidates led me to look for life cycle effects in 1984 Democratic primaries.

References

1 See Mannheim, Karl, “The Problem of Generations,” in Kecskemeti, Paul (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 277–320 Google Scholar; Inglehart, Ronald, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and (for discussions of generational change in partisanship) Abramson, Paul R., Generational Change in American Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975).Google Scholar

2 My original Statement on this subject is “A Socialization Theory of Partisan Realignment,” in Niemi, Richard G. (ed.), The Politics of Future Citizens (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974), 199–219.Google Scholar For more recent formulations, using somewhat revised generational units, see my “The Electoral Cycle and Patterns of American Politics,” The British Journal of Political Science 9 (April 1979), 129–156; and my chapter on the United States in Dalton, Russell, Flanagan, Scott, and Beck, Paul Allen (eds.), Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 The data for 1930–1980 are taken from United States Census counts for each year. See General Population Characteristics, Part 1 U.S. Summary, Chapter B of Volume 1, p. 26. The data for 1984 were extrapolated from the 1980 figures by adding those who were 14–17 years old in 1980 and then by aging each generation by four years without adjusting for immigration/emigration or death. Consequently, the 1984 figures overestimate the contributions of the older generations.

4 This discussion largely depends upon CBS News/The New York Times exit polls. I am grateful to Kathleen A. Frankovic of CBS News for kindly providing me unpublished relationships between age and vote in key primaries.

5 These data from the June 15–20, 1952 Gallup Poll (USAIP00494K) were provided by The Roper Center of The University of Connecticut.

6 The difficulties in distinguishing among generational, life cycle, and period effects (which are mostly ignored in this essay) are ably discussed in Mason, Karen Oppenheim et al., “Some Methodological Issues in Cohort Analysis of Archival Data,” American Sociological Review 38 (April 1973), 242–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar