In a piece written before the Iowa results were in, Michael Barone has identified a phenomenon he calls The 16-Year Itch.
Every 16 years--in 1976, 1992 and now in 2008--American voters have seemed less interested in experience and credentials and more interested in a new face unconnected to the current political establishment. What can explain this 16-year itch?Posted by dan at January 4, 2008 9:11 AMThe first explanation is that voters are responding to public policy failures. The insiders have screwed up; let's take a chance on an outsider.
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Voters make pretty much the same decisions time and again for 14 years. Then in the 16th year decide they are disgusted with the results.
Why 16 years? Political scientists like to come up with generalizations about voting behavior for all time. The problem is that we don't have the same electorate over time. Political scientists have developed rules for predicting presidential elections based on macroeconomic trends at a time when most voters remembered the trauma of the Great Depression. Most voters today don't and those rules no longer work.
One such rule predicted that Al Gore would get 56% of the vote in 2000, which was 8% off. Your barber or hairdresser could have come closer.
My thought is that, over a period of 16 years, there is enough turnover in the electorate to stimulate an itch that produces a willingness to take a chance on something new.
Over time, the median-age voter in American elections has been about 45 years old. This means that the median-age voter in 1976 was born around 1931--old enough to have experienced post-World War II prosperity and foreign policy success, and then to have been disgusted by Vietnam and Watergate.
The median-age voter in 1992 was born around 1947 (the same year as Dan Quayle and Hillary Clinton, one year after Messrs. Clinton and Bush, one year before Mr. Gore). These voters came of age in the culture wars of the 1960s. They experienced stagflation and gas lines of the 1970s, and the prosperity and foreign policy successes of the 1980s. Mr. Clinton persuaded these voters to take a chance on change by promising not to radically alter policy. They rebuked him when he tried to break that promise, then for 14 years remained closely divided along culture lines as if the '60s never ended.
The median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1963, so he or she missed out on the culture wars of the '60s, and on the economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s. These voters have experienced low-inflation economic growth something like 95% of their adult lives--something true of no other generation in history. They are weary of the cultural polarization of our politics, relatively unconcerned about the downside risks of big government programs, and largely unaware of America's historic foreign policy successes. They are ready, it seems, to take a chance on an outside-the-system candidate.