Are there any studies or trends that show one party winning out with the younger generation overall?

I'd assume it would be the Dems but re-electing W really makes me rethink that.

Are there any studies or trends that show one party winning out with the younger generation overall?

I'd assume it would be the Dems but re-electing W really makes me rethink that.

Not that it would happen, but if Obama and Clinton were able to secure the White House as Democrat for the next 16 years, I'd say the Republican party as we know it today would probably never regain its hold.

The most amazing political chart I ever saw talked about this.. They found like an 80% correlation based on who was leading the country when an individual was around 12 years of age..

Reagan was president when I was 12. I guess I'm one of the exceptions to the correlation.

I was giving a fast turn.. It was the administration from 8-12 years old.. Maybe Carter works for you..

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
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Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads....

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

Well, one of my reasons for supporting Republicans is their nominal support of capitalism and torture. Now all I have is the torture part .

I like that Brooks is one of the most self-critical commentators in the conservative movement.

I just wonder where these self-critical commentators have been the past 8 years, during the torture, human rights abuses, and Republican borrow-and-spending spree. And Brooks himself played a helping hand in alienating the intellectual elite. I'm glad they're finally crawling out of the woodwork, but it would have been more convincing if they hadn't waited until the waning months of Bush's administration to wipe their hands of him.

David Brooks, on the other hand, has embraced his position as the big-name right-wing commentator on the New York Times. I don't think he had any choice but to support the Bush philosophy...the Times needs to fight off the notion of being "too liberal

He did make a case for gay marriage a few years ago. He's no Jonah Goldberg or Robert Novak, at least.