“As You Get Older, You Get More Conservative”

In case you’ve never read this blog before… guess what, the political trope popularized by (Conservative statesman) Winston Churchill that age and conservatism are positively correlated is an overstatement. I heard this claim for the first time in awhile today, so a couple of graphs courtesy of OpenSecrets seem worth pointing out:

These charts, which OpenSecrets hosts using FusionCharts, have been concatenated by me. As you can see, over the past twenty years, almost half of Senate-oriented politically active seniors have donated to Democratic Senators and House-oriented seniors have semi-reliably contributed more to Democrats than Republicans. And the top two Democratic recipients of cash from American seniors? Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold, DW-NOMINATE scores of, what, -.998 and -.9, respectively? Something like that? Somebody check me on that.

Consider that the first baby boomer didn’t retire until 2007. All the folks who grew up in the fifties, sixties and seventies won’t actually start filling campaign coffers in the “retired” column until, well… around now. I predict that in ten years, Winston Churchill’s prognostication will be DOA.