The inexorable rise of the elderly Greens voter

Those with no wealth to conserve are blasé about radical social transformations. Who’d have thought?

Photo by Nora Hutton on Unsplash

Around liberal democracies today the clearest indicator of a person’s voting behaviour is not traditional indicators of wealth, education level or social status, but their age… The research shows that as people move through different stages of life, there are two significant events that shift young people from voting centre-left to voting centre-right: they get married and buy a home. [Younger Australians inability to get into the housing market] is why inner-urban areas such as Melbourne and Richmond are trending Greens, and where once evolving in your electoral maturity might have been Labor to Liberal, their graduation is from Greens to Labor.
Tim Wilson, 43-year-old former federal Liberal MP

If you’re not a Socialist by the time you’re 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a Conservative by the time you’re 40 you have no brain
Variously, but never definitively, attributed

If you’re not a politics nerd you probably aren’t aware of this, but voters are failing to age out of their youthful radicalism. Across the Anglosphere, as noted by the afore-quoted Tim Wilson, that means leftist radicalism. It can mean leftist radicalism in Europe as well, but it’s often a form of anti-migrant right-wing populism.

English speakers frequently assume that it’s only disgruntled blue-collar men of a certain age who are attracted to Hard Right political parties. That may be the case in Anglosphere nations. But in Europe, lots of young and well-educated twentysomethings, thirtysomethings and fortysomethings support the likes of Le Pen, Meloni and Orbán. As I’ve noted previously, while nervous business, political and cultural elites took great solace from erstwhile investment banker Emmanuel Macron’s post-Trump-and-Brexit victory in the 2017 French presidential election, many French people, especially younger French people, initially voted for the Far Right or Far Left candidates. Just as they did in last year’s French presidential election. As The Economist noted of the 2022 poll:

 Had only the ballots of those under 60 been counted in the first round on April 10th, Mr Macron would have come third – leaving France to pick between extremists of the left and right in the run-off a fortnight later. Across Europe, many mainstream leaders owe their jobs to a grey-haired (and no-haired-at-all) electoral bulwark loyally trudging to the polls. They will not be around forever. Either today’s youngsters will have to mellow into the middle ground as they age, or Europe will drift away from the predictable centrism it has comfortably espoused for decades.

How things are playing out down under  
Many mature journalists, academics and political operators in other Western nations have observed that their juniors have been failing to age into (social, cultural and political) conservatism. I’ve long argued something similar was happening in Australia but thought nobody, Tim Wilson and I excepted, was paying much attention to this electorally seismic change. Even after the cosy Labor-Coalition duopoly was disrupted by the Greens and the Teals during the 2022 election.

But as it turns out, Matthew Taylor of the Centre for Independent Studies has been looking into the issue closely. A few days ago, his report – Generation Left: young voters deserting the right – dropped. The tl;dr version of the report is that, on average, the Boomers and Gen X started on the Left and, on average, migrated to the Right. Given they tended to reach life’s ‘adulting’ pivot points – partnering up, buying property, having kids – later than the Boomers, I’m assuming Gen Xers held onto their youthful idealism longer as well. But, according to Taylor, they did make the standard political journey, albeit at an older age than preceding generations:

Despite a modest (projected) increase in the average age of the electorate from 47.3 in 2022 to 48.7 by 2040, this period will see considerable change in its generational composition. Although the ‘pro-Coalition’ generations (mostly Baby Boomers and Generation X) were a majority of voters at the last election (56.2 per cent), by 2040 they will make up less than a third (30.2 per cent)… Given Millennials’ modest inclination towards the Coalition — and Generation Z’s present aversion to it — changing generational demography could have politically important ramifications if these generational voting behaviours continue into the future.         

What kind of politically important ramifications? Taylor’s report explores them at length, but media reporting highlighted his most attention-grabbing findings. In a Sydney Morning Herald article titled ‘Coalition could lose 35 seats as Millennials, Gen Z reshape politics’, James Massola and Paul Sakkal note:

The Coalition could lose the next six elections because Millennials and Generation Z voters aren’t shifting towards conservatives as they get older, prompting five Liberal MPs to urge the party to transform its relationship with younger Australians.

The Massola and Sakkal article went on to quote Liberal Party pollster Tony Barry, who conceded that policies geared towards older voters in areas such as housing, superannuation, climate change and social policy were, unsurprisingly, failing to resonate with The Yoof (and still relatively yoof-ful). Barry observed:

“Millennial voters are now taking longer to reach the sort of milestones that have historically led to more conservative voting patterns. They’re starting families later, and at a time when it’s increasingly difficult for them to enter the property market. Millennials locked out of the housing market feel they have no stake in the economy, so the Liberal Party’s legacy political strength of ‘good economic management’ is meaningless to them.

The 44-year-old Waleed Aly, also in the Sydney Morning Herald, noted that the youngsters have their doubts about liberalism, especially economic liberalism: 

The Anglospheric trend has younger voters turning away from conservative parties, the most plausible scenario is that they’re increasingly sceptical of liberal economics. These are generations for whom a lightly regulated free market connotes runaway carbon emissions, and capital investment means a hopelessly inflated housing market… Wages are relatively stagnant. For Millennials who have young children or are thinking about having them, this must seem dauntingly costly. The end result is a sense of widening inequality along the lines of asset ownership, debt levels, and ultimately age. In short, a system stacked against the interests of the young.

Aly goes on to aver that unprecedentedly large numbers of young and no-longer-so-young people voting for parties that unabashedly reject the neoliberal consensus of the last four decades is “revolutionary”:

It’s not the story of someone wanting to make the world a better place, only to decide that once they have mortgages and children that the more mundane things really do matter, and that survival and comfort will do. I suspect this stems from a deeper conviction that the system is broken. It is, in its way, more revolutionary. But actually it represents a serious danger to conservative parties precisely because it is pragmatic: because it is about a disillusionment with concrete circumstances, and a sense that the guardians of liberalism – at least in one form – can no longer presume to have the licence to dictate solutions.

In an article for the Australian (paywalled), Matthew Taylor himself addressed why the Coalition, which has been in power federally for 20 of the last 27 years, can’t afford complacency. Taylor argues that voting patterns are undergoing – in fact, have already undergone – a possibly irreversible change:  

Underneath the short-term cycles is a structural tide that has significant influence on how often a party is in government over time. And – for the first time in decades – the structural tide is starting to run rapidly against the Coalition… As the boomers have aged and drifted further right, their demographic bulge has been a big benefit to the Coalition. However, the generations that follow them are turning out quite different… millennials’ life cycle voting behaviour does not appear to be following that of earlier generations. Based on current trends, Millennials will not cross over to the Coalition until their 80s… Gen Zers are not moving towards the Coalition at all as they enter their late 20s. Not only did they enter the electorate with historically low levels of support for the Coalition, their support has continued to decline.

Everything must change for everything to stay the same
There’s good and bad news for those on the Right. The good news is that there’s no great mystery about what centre-right parties need to do to appeal to voters under 45. The bad news is that doing those things will enrage their most loyal voters – affluent Boomers who are self-righteously convinced they earned every cent of their historical good fortune. (And, yes, also many of those Gen Xers who managed to hop on the property ownership wealth-escalator before it was too late to do so.)

The news cycle will move on. Taylor’s report will be largely forgotten in a few weeks. But the demographic realities he has highlighted won’t change. At some point, possibly after a second election defeat at the hands of Albanese, the Coalition will need to seriously consider redistributing wealth from the old to the young (or at least the comparatively young).

The Coalition will fear, rightly, that taxing wealth rather than income, reining in super lurks, getting rid of franking credits, putting a thumb on the scale for those buying their first home (rather than those buying their fifth investment property), including the family home in means testing for the age pension, and possibly introducing an inheritance tax will enrage its base.

But it would appear centre-right parties throughout the Anglosphere are going to have to start pissing off the people who do vote for them and advocating for the people that currently don’t if they are to have a long-term future.     

PS – It appears that last week’s Precariat Musings may not have been delivered to some subscribers. If you didn’t get it and would like to read it, you can find it here.