The baby-boomer stranglehold on American elections has ended. While baby boomers still make up the largest voting block—35% of all votes cast in the 2016 general election—they are no longer the majority of voters, Courthouse News reports. According to an analysis from the Pew Research Center, millennials and Generation Xers cast 69.6 million votes in the 2016 election, good enough for a slight majority of the 137.5 million total votes cast. "The shift has occurred as millennials accounted for a growing share of the electorate and as those in the Silent and Greatest Generations aged and died," Pew senior researcher Richard Fry says. Millennials are also aging into voters: The number of millennials who voted in 2016 was nearly double the number that voted in 2008, CBS News reports.
The good news for baby boomers is they still tend to vote in larger numbers than millennials. The bad news is that while their population has already peaked, the millennial population isn't expected to hit its own peak for another 19 years, per the Hill—partly due to immigration. "Millennials are likely to be the only adult generation whose number of eligible voters will appreciably increase in the coming years," Fry says. This all looks likely to be good news for the Democratic Party, especially if millennials continue to show up at the polls in larger numbers. Only 33% of millennials identify as Republican or independents who lean Republican. (More baby boomers stories.)
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