Gallup has a new poll out on age as factor in Iraq war support. Read it quick, because these articles usually go up behind a pay firewall after a while. The study yields this conclusion:
Here again, we find evidence for the persistence of the age factor in views of the war regardless of one's gender or political orientation. Within every subgroup of the American population created by the combination of age, gender, and party identification, those who are 50 and older are more likely than those under age 50 to say the war was a mistake.All in all, perceptions that the war was a mistake range from a low of 20% among 18- to 49-year-old Republican women to a high of 89% among Democratic men and Democratic women aged 50 and older.
It is no great stretch of the imagination to hyothesize, as Gallup does, that older people may have a better regard for history and past wars. And it's fairly interesting suggestion that this generational divide helps Democrats because older people are more likely to vote.
The only age cohort that has more people saying the Iraq war was not a mistake than saying that it was is the 30-39 age group which, perhaps uncoincidentally had formative years that included the Reagan era.
I've suggested in the past that young people are not particularly progressive, but are more libertarian, fooling some people into being overly optimistic about the future based on a false image of an age group that is more supportive of torture than other age groups and more supportive of the idea of "getting even" with enemies.
While they don't have the data to breakdown gender and party by age cohorts as finely tuned as separation by decade (or choose not to share it), these are still interesting trends.
My theory is that younger (as in under-40) people who oppose the war are more likely to do so because they think that Bush has messed things up even though an invasion wasn't necessarily a bad thing. This is one voter bloc that might have a mild downturn in Democratic suport if the Republicans are capable of spinning cosmetic results of the "surge" strategy to falsely suggest improvement. Not a huge downturn, but as past elections show, even the smallest bumps can have an influence on elections.
If a Democratic candidate were to fine-tune a message to an audience, I would suggest that the younger audience should get the "Bush and the Republicans are incompetent, bumbling idiots" while before an older audience it should be stressed that "Bush and the Republicans are immoral and unethical". Of course, Bush and friends are both, but the message should be simplified to one or the other in certain settings.
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