According to data analyzed by The New York Times (NYT), millennial voters, who are an essential part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, are shifting towards the right as they age.
Voters who were 18-29 years old in the 2008 presidential election backed former President Barack Obama at roughly twice the margin they supported then-candidate President Joe Biden in 2020, the NYT reported Thursday. Millennials voted for Biden at a 55% clip, compared to 43% for former President Donald Trump, after exit polls showed a 51% to 45% margin among the cohort.
In the 2022 midterm elections, voters aged 34-43 supported Democratic congressional candidates by a 10% margin, polls conducted by the NYT and Siena College found.
The trend of millennials shifting right as they age is part of a larger pattern of demographic cohorts becoming more conservative as they get older, data from Cornell University’s Roper Center shows. Voters from most political cohorts under the age of 50 voted for Republicans in larger numbers in the 2020 presidential election compared to 2012, with the shifts most noticeable among older voters.
Millennials shifting to the right is primarily a trend among the older part of the generation who came of age politically from 2004-08, the NYT found. Younger millennials became eligible to vote after the 2008 election, canceling out the political gains Republicans made with their older counterparts.
Heavily Democratic voting patterns in the younger millennials explains why a Financial Times survey found millennials are not becoming more conservative as they age, despite the voting patterns by those aged 34-43. These voters became involved in politics during the rise of Independent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, unlike those who were first brought into politics by Barack Obama.
