Eighties Backlash

Ronald Reagan scored big with American youth in last November’s election, but recent polls show some slippage among 18- to 25year-olds. Exit polls last November indicated that 58 per cent of 18- to 25year-old voters cast their ballots for Mr. Reagan. In its mid-November 1984 survey on party affiliations, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 37 per cent in this age group identified with the GOP and 29 per cent with the Democrats, while 34 per cent called themselves independents. Six months later, in May 1985, the NYT/ CBS News survey showed that the GOP had dropped to 29 per cent, Democrats had climbed to 34 per cent, and independents had dropped to 29 per cent. (Eight per cent didn’t know.) Are the Republicans letting youth slip between their fingers?

Republican strategists in town who take the long view point to history’s cyclical bent to explain the marginal youth fall-off from the GOP: The earnest, young, upwardly mobile college student or IBM marketing executive of 1981 or 1982 closely parallels the World War II veteran of 1945, fresh out of the service and eager to share in the American dream, who became the “organization man” of the Fifties and the man in the grey flannel suit of the Sixties. “The optimism and conformity of the late Forties and Fifties,” says a Republican analyst, “bred an inevitable backlash in the Sixties. So, too, in the early Eighties, the Fifties serenity replayed itself, and now the Sixties backlash is replaying itself.”

JM

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John McLaughlin

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Ronald Reagan scored big with American youth in last November’s election, but recent polls show some slippage among 18- to 25year-olds. Exit polls last November indicated that 58 per cent of 18- to 25year-old voters cast their ballots for Mr. Reagan. In its mid-November 1984 survey on party affiliations, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 37 per cent in this age group identified with the GOP and 29 per cent with the Democrats, while 34 per cent called themselves independents. Six months later, in May 1985, the NYT/ CBS News survey showed that the GOP had dropped to 29 per cent, Democrats had climbed to 34 per cent, and independents had dropped to 29 per cent. (Eight per cent didn’t know.) Are the Republicans letting youth slip between their fingers?

Republican strategists in town who take the long view point to history’s cyclical bent to explain the marginal youth fall-off from the GOP: The earnest, young, upwardly mobile college student or IBM marketing executive of 1981 or 1982 closely parallels the World War II veteran of 1945, fresh out of the service and eager to share in the American dream, who became the “organization man” of the Fifties and the man in the grey flannel suit of the Sixties. “The optimism and conformity of the late Forties and Fifties,” says a Republican analyst, “bred an inevitable backlash in the Sixties. So, too, in the early Eighties, the Fifties serenity replayed itself, and now the Sixties backlash is replaying itself.”