Findings:
For some very strange reason, the exit polls show that in Mississippi, young voters became more Republican. This doesn't make sense since Obama was able to still win young voters, but Kerry, the northeastern "elitist liberal", actually won 63% of these voters. I had asked a young, black college professor from MS about that and she said the 63% could be because of a number of reasons: (1) young voters in Mississippi opposed the Iraq War on religious grounds, (2) young voters in Mississippi are much more mixed racially than the older generation which is whiter, (3) even in Mississippi, young voters are more progressive.
re: Mississippi
It could be that
(1) Obama is black, and white Mississippians are not accustomed to voting for blacks for any office. Mississippi politics are really scummy irrespective of ethnicity, and Obama looks like the sort of leader that white Mississippians associate with black-majority places in Mississippi in which white politicians have no chance to win. Machine politics are the norm in Mississippi, even in rural counties. (White machine politicians are no better). Kerry is white.
(2) John McCain has ancestral ties to Mississippi.
(3) Mississippi's response to Hurricane Katrina -- much in contrast to that of Louisiana -- really was competent, and Dubya co-operated well with its reconstruction, at least with white Republicans.
(4) If Mississippians would elect politicians on merit instead of on identity-group politics, they would end up with lesser polarization, better government, and lesser corruption.
Which illustrates the tendency.
Georgia has much more of a military presence. White youth drawn into the military are much more politically-conservative and more rural than suburban. Such might be part of the difference. But add to that, Georgia is split between its north (largely Greater Atlanta and such a college town as Athens) and the more rural South Georgia. I figure that northern Georgia votes much like North Carolina -- but southern Georgia is Deep South -- really deep. North Carolina and Greater Atlanta have attracted many Northern economic migrants -- but southern Georgia has attracted neither the economic migrants nor the winter-evaders who go farther south to Florida. Northern Georgia is much like North Carolina; southern Georgia might as well be Mississippi or Alabama.
It's important to remember that the 18-24-year-olds of 2004 became the 22-to-28-year-olds of 2008. Voting habits may change with age, and all birth-year cohorts seem to become less liberal on drugs, sex, crime, family life, with age... with the exceptions of gays and lesbians, most have children. But although people with children become more conservative about culture, especially as their children become adolescents, they might not become more 'conservative' on economics and ethnicity. If associated with labor unions they tend to become more liberal on economics. Note also that if they are deferring children until the economy improves then they may be slower to go conservative even on cultural issues.
Core personalities and values do
not change with time. Peo-ple do not become more trusting of entrenched elites and less trustful of ethnic minorities with time.
Another way of looking at it: the GOP coalition of corporate exploiters and fundamentalist preachers has little to offer current youth. That coalition has created the sort of society in which the most reliable attribute of success is to be born into the Right Family. All others not so fortunately-born face glass ceilings if they have talent and piked pits if they falter or even run into some misfortune (like a mass layoff). That is how old-fashioned aristocratic societies work in economics and in religious culture: they offer goodies for the well-connected in This World, pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die for those who accept their lot (including poverty and subjection in This World), and a contempt for rational thought. The GOP differs from old-fashioned aristocracies (and fascist dictatorships that use Bolshevik terror to preserve and promote the interests of rapacious elites) only in failing to revive the brutal punishments once certain for anyone who showed any tendency toward rebellion or dissent.
People now in their thirties and forties blame themselves for their lot (I didn't get enough or the right sort of education, I didn't take the pay cut to move to Alabama) and complain; people in their teens and twenties don't blame themselves. They see a system that works only for a few.
If anything, Generation X has shown some erosion in GOP support because it has endured the mass layoffs, two-tier wage scales, and tax shifts from the rich to the non-rich -- and of course, the sockdolager of discreditation of the GOP -- the subprime mortgage meltdown.
It will revolutionize American politics -- but slowly. The young Obama voters are likely to be much more liberal than anyone older, and although voters who follow them might be less liberal on economic issues (people born after about 2005 will have no memory of George W. Botch as an active politician)... those youth will have become many of the elected public officials who make the big decision, the clergy who preach (they will be more like Billy Graham or Fulton Sheen than like John Hagee or Rod Parsley -- more rational if still orthodox in theology), the teachers in schools, the journalists of the contemporary media, the creators of mass culture, and of course the union officials. They may become somewhat more conservative with time as they finally have a stake in the system as business executives, owners of profitable small businesses, and holders of lucrative professions -- and have children in adolescence -- but much less conservative than their elders and probably their juniors.
Maybe they will define what the conservatism of the time is -- more in family life and culture than as we see it in economics today. Conservatism
circa 2040-2050 may mean the preservation of something good instead of an attempt to fit people into a world of economic and institutional nastiness on behalf of the "Right People" whose indulgence and pampering is the objective of a well-ordered society (as around 2000-2005 under GOP majorities).
An eighty-year-rule seems to apply to American history. I look at George W. Bush and I see the weak leadership of America in the 1920s, 1850s, and 1760s -- leadership that lacked the will to say no to rapacious elites and whose economic pandering to those elites created economic bubbles that blew up and left people extremely dissatisfied. American Revolution -- Civil War -- World War II -- and whatever happens in the 2010s ... all spaced by a long human lifetime, the time that it takes for memories to vanish through deaths.