Oh, For Goodness Sake

Why Older Whites Are Dominating the GOP Primaries

After Super Tuesday, exit polls have now been conducted in 14 states from all regions of the country. In all 14 of those states, white voters, and voters over 50, both comprised a significantly larger share of the electorate in this year’s GOP primary than they did in the 2008 general election. In many cases, the gap on each front has been enormous.

These patterns underscore the extent to which the modern GOP coalition revolves around white voters-and increasingly, as the graying baby boom moves right, older white voters.

That coalition powered the Republican Party’s historic gains in 2010. That was an election in which seniors comprised an unusually large share of the overall electorate; the minority share of the vote declined more than usual between a presidential race and the succeeding midterm; and the GOP won the highest share of white voters it has ever captured in a Congressional election, according to polling dating back to 1948. In 2010, Republicans ran especially well with older whites, capturing fully 63 percent of them, exit polls found.

This November, though, the electorate almost certainly will be considerably younger and more tilted toward minorities than it was in 2010. Against that backdrop, the dominance of the GOP primary race by older whites could signal challenges for the party in reaching that broader universe of voters. It also increases the likelihood that the 2012 election will generate a titanic collision between a Democratic coalition that revolves around minorities, younger voters and college-educated whites generally more comfortable with the demographic changes diversifying America; and an older, preponderantly white and heavily working-class Republican coalition heavily reliant on the voters most uneasy with those changes.

So far, according to exit polls posted on CNN.com, whites have cast at least 90 percent of the votes in every Republican primary except Florida (83 percent) and Arizona (89 percent). In every other state except Michigan (92 percent) and Nevada (90 percent) whites have comprised at least 94 percent of the GOP vote this year. That includes Georgia (94), Virginia (94), Ohio (96), Oklahoma (96), Tennessee (97), South Carolina (98), Massachusetts (98), Iowa (99), New Hampshire (99), and Vermont (99).

Ron Brownstein, National Journal

This fits with Ed Kilgore’s noticing the other day, this same demographic is what’s pushing the Republican Party to the crazy house. I myself am a gray, white baby-boomer from the working class and obviously a proud Obama supporter. While I am more conservative than I was as a youngster, who isn’t?, I couldn’t live long enough to understand how so much of my generation went this shameful way.