Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has an interesting post about political identity and the President in office when a person turns 18. There appears to be a reasonably significant correlation between a person’s political affiliation and the President in office when the person turned 18.
A good President in office tends to correlate with a person’s identification with that President’s political party, apparently for a lifetime. And a bad President tends to correlate with identification with the opposite political party. Correlation doesn’t equal causation and all of that, but Nate Silver’s hypothesis is that Bush’s exceptional badness might haunt the Republicans for generations to come (much as they have had ongoing benefits, generally, from Reagan’s tenure.)
Interesting theory…which is why I was so angry the Indiana Democratic Primary in May of 2008. They thought it was great the D’s were having a fight. I saw thousands of first time voters and knew how locked in those D voters would be for years to come. So much for the notion that a contested primary is always bad.
I think there’s something to that; Carter bad and Reagan good lasted until Clinton.
I’ve had a related working theory about affiliation development — completely anecdotal and unscientific, of course. There appears to be a correlation amongst my acquaintances: Purdue – conservative, IU & Ball State – liberal.
It’s not true in every case, but for a significant chunk of people I know where it is.
I agree with Steph.
Maybe it’s a right-brain, left-brain type of thing…..