By Peter Levine
As Rick Santorum surges in polls of registered Republicans, skeptics are asking whether he can draw broad support against President Barack Obama. They are particularly focused on his last campaign, the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate race, which he lost by 18 points to Bob Casey Jr.
The age gap in that election has received relatively little attention. It was actually more of a chasm than a gap. Bob Casey won the under-30 vote in a 36-point landslide, 68%-32%. In contrast, the Democrat won just 56% of the 60-and-older vote. In an article last week, Geoff Garin, a leading Democratic pollster and one of Bob Casey’s pollsters in that race, commented, “Young people thought he was kind of weirdly out of sync with modern times.”
Any election can be an anomaly, but Santorum’s loss preceded the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Obama beat Sen. John McCain among young people by a similarly lopsided margin of 66%-32%. Those young votes mattered: 22 million voters under 30 turned out in 2008, and they provided a substantial portion of the Democrats’ winning coalition. Theirs is a big generation — already, more people under the age of 30 are eligible to vote than those over 64 — and they will dominate the electorate in decades to come.
As Rick Santorum surges in polls of registered Republicans, skeptics are asking whether he can draw broad support against President Barack Obama. They are particularly focused on his last campaign, the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate race, which he lost by 18 points to Bob Casey Jr.
The age gap in that election has received relatively little attention. It was actually more of a chasm than a gap. Bob Casey won the under-30 vote in a 36-point landslide, 68%-32%. In contrast, the Democrat won just 56% of the 60-and-older vote. In an article last week, Geoff Garin, a leading Democratic pollster and one of Bob Casey’s pollsters in that race, commented, “Young people thought he was kind of weirdly out of sync with modern times.”
Any election can be an anomaly, but Santorum’s loss preceded the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Obama beat Sen. John McCain among young people by a similarly lopsided margin of 66%-32%. Those young votes mattered: 22 million voters under 30 turned out in 2008, and they provided a substantial portion of the Democrats’ winning coalition. Theirs is a big generation — already, more people under the age of 30 are eligible to vote than those over 64 — and they will dominate the electorate in decades to come.
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