We're Young, We're Liberal, Get Used To It

This is everybody's favorite graphic of the day:



It's part of a New York Times article which tracks a trend we've been seeing for a while now, that the 18-29 generation of "millennials" is quite liberal and quite open to ideas like national health insurance and gay marriage. I do think this has been the case for a LONG time; in the 1960s, the hippies weren't exactly Goldwater-Nixon supporters. One does tend to get a bit more conservative as they get older. But Matthew Yglesias may be on to something.

One thing that writeups of these findings tend to miss out on is that the cohort of 18-29 year-olds contains a substantially smaller proportion of white people than does the 30+ cohort. Viewed through that lens, combined with basic knowledge of race's heavy role in US politics, the left-leaning tendencies of the youngest voting cohort aren't that surprising. The contrast with the substantially more conservative "Generation X" cohort is, however, telling.

And Matt's right that this is the real reason why Republicans who think strategically are scrambling to cobble together some immigration reform legislation to get Latinos to like them again, though I think they're too far gone on this already. Plus, the immigrants they legalize, who have endured taunts and calls for deportation from the very vocal right-wing of the Party, aren't likely to vote Republican anytime soon either. It's actually a nearly impossible needlt for the GOP to thread.

UPDATE: The WSJ editorial board gets this, but honestly they're powerless to do anything about it (except cage more minority voters).