Almost immediately after George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the political minds in his administration set to the task of trying to build the type of lasting partisan shifts achieved by few Presidents in American history. Jackson. Lincoln. McKinley. Roosevelt. Reagan. That effort was ramped up following the attacks on New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia in the fall of 2001 -- particularly during the lead-up to the midterm elections one year later -- and in the wake of the President's successful reelection campaign his advisors moved forward with their ambitious plan by attempting to partially privatize Social Security, overhauling the federal tax structure, passing an immigration reform plan and centralizing power within the executive branch.
Hubris got the better of this President, as it has done to countless leaders in the past, and his moves increasingly began looking like overreaches rather than decisive, popular actions. From the first days of George W. Bush's second term, his approval ranking began to fall, and with a few exceptions (late 2005 and the summer of 2006), it has continued to do so ever since, falling into the 30s -- a tepid level of support seldom achieved by other Presidents. Perhaps more importantly, the President's disapproval rating has remained above 50 percent for nearly a year and a half, standing today at, or slightly below, 60 percent. As a result, President Bush may actually be achieving an enduring political transformation -- though not the type he had hoped for or expected. David D. Kirkpatrick has the story in The New York Times' Week in Review.
Turning momentary popularity into a more lasting majority, of course, takes more than a midterm election. For one thing, voters typically develop a party preference based on the political atmosphere at the time they come of age and grow more attached to that party over the course of their lives. The voters who came of age in the 1930's, for example, have remained the most solidly Democratic. Fifty-seven percent are Democrats and only 38 percent are Republican, according to the American National Election Study.Recent surveys and exit polls suggest that the Democrats have regained the upper hand among the young voters who entered the electorate over the last 15 years, and political scientists say dismay at the Iraq war is likely to prolong that trend.
"The longer Bush's approval ratings stay in the mid-30's, the more lost young Republicans there will be in the next generation," said Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Yale. But by the same rule, voters who came of age in the Reagan era are reliably Republican. Voters around the age of 36 are the only age group in which Republicans outnumber Democrats, according to 2006 surveys by the Pew Research Center. And it will be decades before they pass through the populace, "like an elephant through a boa constrictor," Professor Hansen said.
While it's not yet clear that George W. Bush's unpopularity among today's younger voters will indeed last through the decades as the generation grows older, there are indications that younger voters' disapproval of the President are hardening.
In 2000, George W. Bush only narrowly lost the 18-29 age bracket, with Al Gore garnering 48 percent to his 46 percent. In 2004, the President lost a little ground among the demographic, falling to 45 percent while John Kerry outperformed Al Gore by securing the support of 54 percent of the group (the only age group he won, it should be noted). Now, according to the latest survey from the Cook Political Report (.doc), which finds the President's approval numbers slightly more favorable than the consensus of most polls, the President's approval rating among those aged 18 to 29 is six points lower than his overall approval rating. What's more, on the generic congressional ballot question, the Democrats' lead among younger voters is nearly twice as large as it is among all registered voters.
These numbers clearly point to the type of situation laid out by professor Green. George W. Bush may actually be transforming the electorate into one significantly less likely to vote Republican than the one he encountered just six short years ago. That said, the Democrats do need to win this year in order to capitalize on this potential or else they run the risk of disheartening a key segment of their base for many years to come.
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