The America of today bears little resemblance to the country of 50 years ago. It is older. It is less white. And those two demographic trends will only accelerate over the next 50 years.
“Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era,” writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center.“The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion.”
Chris Cillizza
Chris Cillizza is founder and editor of The Fix, a leading blog on state and national politics. He is the author of The Gospel According to the Fix: An Insider’s Guide to a Less than Holy World of Politics and an MSNBC contributor and political analyst. He also regularly appears on NBC and NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. He joined The Post in 2005 and was named one of the top 50 journalists by Washingtonian in 2009.
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Taylor’s conclusions come in an essay titled “The Next America” that details the massive shifts currently roiling the county — and what they will mean for its politics going forward. (Taylor has also authored a book by the same name.)
While neither of Taylor’s broadest conclusions — we are getting older and less white — are ground-breaking, he explores the depth, rate and impact of these changes in a way that truly drives home a single basic point: We are through the demographic looking glass.
Let’s start where Taylor starts — with the graying of our population. Medical advances and better eating habits are extending our lives to a point unimaginable even as recently as 1960. Back then, average life expectancy was a shade under 70; in 2011, it was nearly 79. (The gap between men and women has shrunk as well; in 1960 women lived on average seven years longer while in 2011 that advantage dipped to under five years.)
“We’ll have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age five” by 2060, writes Taylor, who notes that what has always been an age pyramid — broad among the young and narrowing significantly as the age ranges rise — will turn into more of an age rectangle over the next five decades. (This phenomenon is not simply the result of people living longer; the birth rate is declining simultaneously.)
The aging of America is happening at the same time as the gap between how young and old see the world, politically speaking, is wider than its ever been before.
In the 2012 election, President Obama won voters age 18-29 60 percent to 37 percent, while losing those 65 and over by 12 points. That 35-point swing between the youngest and oldest voters is all the more remarkable when you consider that as recently as the 2000 presidential election there was virtually no gap in how those voters cast ballots. Al Gore won voters age 18-29 48 percent to 46 percent and voters aged 60 and older by a remarkable similar 51 percent to 47 percent margin.
The other major demographic shift in the populace is the declining white population and surging Hispanic community.
As Taylor notes, the American population was 85 percent white in 1960 but, by 2060, it will be just 43 percent white. By contrast, Hispanics, which comprised just 4 percent of the U.S. population in 1960, are projected to make up more than 30 percent of the U.S. population by 2060, according to Taylor.
The political implications of those changes are profound and already being visited on the two parties. Mitt Romney won the white vote by 20 points in 2012 — the largest margin since Ronald Reagan in his landslide reelection in 1984 — but still lost the election convincingly. That’s because white voters made up just 72 percent of the overall vote, the lowest percentage ever and the sixth straight presidential race where the white vote has declined as a percentage of the overall electorate.
Combine the shrinking white vote with President Obama’s dominance among Hispanics (he won 71 percent of the vote) and African Americans (93 percent), and you see why he won easily among an American electorate that simply looked different than it had in years past.
Perhaps the most interesting finding about ethnicity in Taylor’s piece, however, is not the projected growth of the Hispanic community or shrinkage of the white community, but rather the continued blurring of racial lines.
In 1960, just over 2 percent of the population married someone not of their own race. In 2010, that number had surged to 15.5 percent of the population. As Taylor writes: “By 2050, will our racial categories still make much sense? These days our old labels are having trouble keeping up with our new weddings.”
The broad takeaway from Taylor’s outstanding work is that age and ethnicity are reshaping our country — and even our ways of describing each other — rapidly and meaningfully. Those changes make assumptions based on the past extremely dangerous — in politics and everywhere else. We are entering a new age for America. Both parties need to acknowledge that new reality and act — and react — accordingly.
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