The Baby Boom endures?

Kevin Munger points out: "Harris’s nomination locks in another Boomer presidency." 

 

I hadn't quite thought of it that way. As a product of the leading edge of the Boomers (b. 1947) I don't find it automatic to locate myself in the same age cohort as someone who missed the '50s and most of the '60s. But demographic wizards say all of us born between 1946 and 1964 (including Harris) are out of the same population bulge which first led to a need for new kindergartens and grade schools and now is leading to increased worry about funding Social Security.

Munger is the author of Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture. His commentary on the Harris-Trump match up is interesting. 

Despite being a Boomer, you may have noticed that she’s the young, exciting candidate.

Yes, the generational cutoff points are arbitrary, 19 is too many years to define a coherent generation. But the far more important fact is that Biden and Trump are really quite old.

The echoes of the Baby Boom structure our political, economic and cultural reality. Our country’s age pyramid is just what our country is.

It is a crucial but oddly politically inert fact that at both the mass and elite level, our country is far older than it has ever been before. ...

It’s our electoral institutions [that] cause the US to have such astronomically old leaders. The two-party system, lax campaign and especially campaign finance laws, and the primary system tilt the process heavily in favor of people with time, money and political interest — which, in our society, tends to be older people.

Combine this with the Baby Boom and you get the current situation, playing out in slow motion, a demographic wave not crashing but seeping into and drowning our politics.

... A media-theoretic aside: television has demonstrated its continued dominance of the media ecosystem. The 2024 Biden-Trump debate is — without exaggeration — one of the most important media events in modern history. ...

He goes on to delve into the history of recent elections when there was a substantial difference in ages between candidates (younger won) and the "unmet demand for younger politicians appealing to younger voters."  

We Boomers got to give way someday ... but by once again, somehow, presenting the country with the apparently young candidate in Kamala Harris, we are imprinting yet another generation of young voters with what Munger has named "Boomer Ballast." This has been very good for Democrats for decades.