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The Intergenerational Alliance That Could Send Trump Packing, in 14 Charts
If enough older voters join the young, they will deliver the White House to Joe Biden
“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers,” the historian and social theorist Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his 1931 book about post–Civil War America. Something similar is happening in the United States today, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2019, we argued in The Atlantic that the “coming generation war” will be the defining story in U.S. politics in the 2020s. Millennials (born 1981–1996) and Generation Z (born after 1996) are the most progressive in history — and they show no sign of moderating as they age. Within a decade, these two generations will produce enough voting-age progressives to take over the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, we argued, equal and opposite forces are reshaping the Republican Party. Baby boomers (born 1946–1964) and the silent generation (born 1928–1945) are ever-larger segments of the GOP coalition, dooming the party to political erosion as those generations die off.
In the 2020 presidential election, this framework is basically holding up. The national polls show a clear electorate split along generational lines. Voters ages 45 and younger overwhelmingly favor Joe Biden. Middle-aged and older voters narrowly favor Donald Trump.
However, in the handful of swing states that matter most this year, Covid-19 has given the generation war a surprising twist. A critical mass of seniors has broken ranks and united with younger voters, largely because they are alarmed by Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the pandemic. This new “doughnut hole” generation war explains why President Donald Trump has attacked mail-in voting, which in years past has been a favorite voting method for relatively conservative senior voters. It explains Joe Biden’s strikingly sturdy polling lead in Pennsylvania and Florida, the two most important swing states. And it explains why Trump has been so fixated on culture war and “law and order” issues as he tries to…
