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Baby Boomers

Boomers at 70 will change America — again: Column

They are the largest, best educated and most diverse older generation ever, and the GOP shouldn't count on them.

William H. Frey

This month marks a milestone for the vaunted Baby Boom generation. Its earliest members — including Linda Ronstadt, Diane Keaton, Cheech Marin, Cher, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — are celebrating their 70th birthdays over the course of this year. They are the leading edge of the more than 65 million Boomers who will turn 70 in the next two decades.

Earliest Baby Boomers turn 70 this year.

These seventysomething Boomers are poised to give Millennials some real competition for attention. They have the opportunity to become increasingly relevant — socially, economically and politically — and more responsive than previous seniors to the needs of an ever changing nation.

To begin with, Boomers will greatly inflate the size of the seventysomething population as this “pig in the python” generation shows its strength in old age. The 70- to 79-year-old age group will increase by more than 50% during the next 10 years and by more than 80% by 2035. This will magnify unique demographic changes that Baby Boomers bring because of their ground-breaking history of expanding racial diversity, advancing women’s empowerment, creating more varied households, and gaining new access to education and wealth.

Their distinctiveness continues even as they age. The demographic profile of early Boomers (born between 1946 and 1955) who will enter their 70s over the next 10 years differs sharply from the World War II and Depression era generations at similar times in their collective lives. Although Boomers are whiter than today’s youth, at 26% minority, the first group turning 70 is more racially diverse than any prior older generation. Blacks were the dominant minority group during the 1960s civil rights movement, but immigration over the past half-century has added Hispanic and Asian Boomers to their ranks. This very different older generation provides a much greater opportunity for connecting with today’s more diverse youth than in the past.

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As young adults, early Boomers, bolstered by their role in the women’s movement, eschewed the traditional families of their parents. Now, “modern families” are still more evident among early Boomers than for previous generations at the same age: less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced or never married, and with a greater share of homeowners who are female heads of household. Early Boomer women leapfrogged ahead of previous generations in their educational attainment and work experience, so they are still contributing substantially to the labor force as they enter their 70s.

Because older people are most likely to vote, the political clout of this giant generation will also be substantial. Assuming voter turnout rates from the 2012 presidential election, those ages 61 to 70 will make up 17% of all voters in the 2016 election. Add in the later Boomers, ages 52 to 60, and you get an estimated 35% of all votes expected to be cast by Baby Boomers in 2016 — compared with 24% expected to be cast by lower turnout Millennials ages 18 to 35. In 2024, the entire Boomer generation will be ages 60 to 78, and will still be responsible for a projected 31% of all votes to be cast.

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Trump and other Republican candidates may see Boomers as a large part of their base next year, and understandably so because a majority of seniors have voted Republican in recent presidential elections. But predicting who Boomers will vote for in the future is difficult. The Pew Research Center's 2014 polls show that 49% of early, older Boomers identify or lean Democratic compared with 41% who identify or lean Republican. The numbers for late Boomers are 46% and 41%, respectively. In essence, though voters tend to become more conservative as they age, this sizable and demographically different older bloc can be very much up for grabs with the right messages from future Democratic candidates.

While the country is changing mightily because of a “diversity explosion” among its energetic younger population, Baby Boomers have more in common with today’s youth than was the case with the senior cohorts they are replacing, and they could be a catalyst for change in both politics and culture. They are by far the largest, most educated and most racially diverse older generation to date, as well as the most enlightened one when it comes to women’s issues and roles. Though their enduring '60s culture, retro music and lifestyles may differ sharply from the tastes of today’s youth, they have much to offer in building bridges across generations. When that occurs, the nation will benefit greatly from the still influential Woodstock generation as it blasts its way into its 70s.

William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population-studies professor at the University of Michigan, is author ofDiversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of ContributorsTo read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.

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