A question to consider as the Indiana and North Carolina returns come in today: What’s the biggest determining demographic factor in the Democratic primary? It’s gender, right? God knows you can’t open a newspaper politics section, or even a style section, without reading about the great war between the boys and the girls in the Democratic party. Or, wait—it’s got to be race. That, and religion. I mean, look at how much Jeremiah Wright dominated the news! Or, oh yeah, I forgot—class. It’s about the latte liberals versus the Dunkin Donuts Dems! It’s the lunchpails versus the bento boxes! Right?
Wrong. Across the electorate as a whole, the single most significant factor in determining whether a Democratic-primary voter goes for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is age. Take the number 45 and draw a line through the middle of it: if you’re over 45, you’re more likely to go Clinton, if you’re under, you’re more likely to go Obama. Period. (The one exception, as this New York Times article points out, is race, but only for African American voters. The white vote splits much more evenly.) For all the attention paid in Pennsylvania, for instance, to the number of blue-collar white voters and how best to reach them, in the end the state that has the second highest percentage of senior citizens in the nation went for Hillary.
If that’s the case, why doesn’t age get more attention in the political coverage and the analysis of election returns? Why aren’t there anguished analyses of why Clinton can’t reach young people or why Obama can’t win over seniors? I’m not saying the media never covers it, of course—given how much airtime the election gets, the political media is bound to cover everything eventually. (Update: And to be fair, the reason I know about the age gap at all is, duh, media reports). But proportionally it doesn’t get nearly the play and headline coverage as race, gender and class have.
What gives? A few theories, if not actual answers, after the jump:
* We don’t want to talk about it, because it makes us feel old. This is my first, knee-jerk guess, but on further thought it’s probably wrong. Certainly it’s true that by and large the major decision-makers at TV networks, magazines and newspapers are Boomers, and Boomers have never cared for admitting that they’re on the older side of an age divide. But coverage decisions aren’t made entirely top-down, and a big chunk of the high-profile reporters covering the campaign are under 45, from our own Ana Marie Cox to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (and, of course, a big chunk of the blogosphere). Besides, if Boomer vanity is a factor, then you also have to consider that a lot of media Boomers are, or appear to be, pro-Obama—so if anything, generation-gap coverage would make them feel younger than their peers.
* It’s not sexy. Also a knee-jerk explanation, but probably more plausible. Unlike in 1968, people just don’t fight about age the way they do over race or sex. (They don’t yet, anyway. See if that changes if there’s a convention fight.) You can guarantee a zesty back-and-forth on a cable show asking whether Obama voters are sexist or Clinton voters are racist. Age is not seen as the same kind of attention draw.
* Guilt, or lack thereof. Given the number of culture wars that have been fought in the media over race and gender—not just in the election but in scads of stories from the Duke lacrosse case back to O.J. and beyond—there’s an ingrained sensitivity to those issues in the media. (Which is complicated by our knowledge that our profession’s top positions are dominated by white men.) And as in the Kurt Andersen column we discussed yesterday, especially among the higher-paid national media, there’s a certain amount of class guilt or self-consciousness about being out of touch with regular people. So when someone makes elitism an issue in an election (see: Kerry, John, windsurfing and) we go into overdrive. Age, on the other hand, isn’t much of a source of guilt in the media. If anything—working in an advertising-based business in which sponsors pay more to reach younger audiences—we’re trained to see dividing people by age as being natural and part of business.
* The campaigns don’t talk much about it, except through the code words “change” and “experience.” If true, a very lame reason indeed.
* Condescension. I wonder if part of the reason is simply that, where we see racial, gender and economic schisms as troubling, we see generation gaps as being natural and not worth talking about. And part of the reason for that, I suspect, is a simplistic view of how voters think. We look at the age gap in voting and assume that people are just simple-mindedly joining their affinity groups, without any deeper issues behind the decision. Young people like the younger guy, the new, cool “product”; older people like someone their age, a familiar brand they know from way back when. But there’s more to it than that, and the reasons for the age breakdown should be at least as interesting and worth analyzing as those for age and gender.
The generation gap in voting is a question not just of different ages but different worldviews: for instance, the Obama message of grassroots networking and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is essentially a Web 2.0 view of politics, while the Clinton argument that voters want to hire someone experienced who will do the job for them is very different. And that difference says a lot about where the country may be headed, not just in politics but in communications, in business, in culture. Surely that’s as worthy of analyzing as wearing a flag pin or drinking a whiskey shot?