Younger generations and (large) cities - could this actually *hurt* Democrats?

[Person Man]

It's what will make the democrats a permanent minority.

The generation gap has never been larger and the electorate will only get older, the only thing saving the democrats is that the graying of America is way less sever than Europe's but in the end old people will increasingly outnumber young people and increasingly vote for the GOP.

Labour is trapped in the same situation in the UK and not even the Tories botching Brexit will help them, the 60+ electorate is extremely eurosceptic and will always vote Tory by a landslide.

That is maybe the one thing that the Republicans have going for them. People living longer and having fewer kids. Then again, "aspirational" voters are living shorter lives as white collar whites and minorities improve.

[Person Man]

What I mean by the thread title is the tendency of young, college-educated, and liberal-minded people to congregate in certain, mostly large cities/urban areas. This is true for people of this description from every region of the country (or of the world, in many cases these days), for both men and women of this description, people of all ethnic and racial groups, as well as both LGBT individuals and those who are straight/"cis", and furthermore, people who don't belong to (conservative, white) Christian groups, or who are even religious at all. And all of these categories overlap in significant ways, of course.

The implication here is that the places where all of these younger, largely liberal/left-wing people move tend to be already overwhelmingly Democratic areas, and are more often than not in pretty safely Democratic states, so if anything, this trend is getting stronger. This obviously already hurts the Democratic Party in down-ballot races, but I'd argue it hurt them in the most recent presidential election as well. And in light of Republicans currently controlling the governments of a lot of "purple" states - which has lead to both egregious gerrymandering and even more egregious voter suppression efforts - as well as the younger generation continuing to lag behind older Americans in registration, turnout, and broader political participation (for various reasons that would take another, longer post to adequately cover), I'm seriously wondering if these demographic trends that on the surface do indeed look very friendly to Democrats might actually hurt them, if only in the short-to-medium-term.

Curious as to what others' thoughts are on this topic.

You correctly noted the problems posed for Democrats due to the distribution of voters but there is also another problem, which is that such extreme political segregation isolates a large share of Democratic voters to the wider culture, making it harder for them to understand how everyone else is thinking and makes everyone else understand their thinking less and less. The reason why this harms the Democrats rather than helping them is that the progressive cultural zones are far less than half the country's population. They need more votes elsewhere than the Republicans do in the hipster zones. If the country eventually urbanizes and gentrifies to the point where that is no longer the case then the Republicans would turn out to be on the short end of the stick. But we're very far from there and in the meantime this will continue to harm the Democrats.

For the Presidency and the House, literally all they need is for Southern big cities to start acting like big cities in the rest of the country.  We just took a dramatic move in that direction, and I always find it odd that most everyone here casually assumes the Southern white vote will stay 80%ish R indefinitely.  It's certainly much more of an anomaly than some town in Ohio going from 50% Romney to 60% Trump.  People born after 1980 have a totally different idea of what it means to be culturally Southern, and I expect this to be reflected at the polls eventually.

The Senate is much more of a problem.  Basically, they either need the Mormon states or 5 Joe Manchins.

That is what they said the year they elected McCaskill, Webb, Tester, and Briwn by double digits.

[Person Man]

The "Millennials are concentrating in the cities" thing is objectively false, though: http://joelkotkin.com/forget-urban-stereotypes-millennial-america-really-looks-like/

Unless moving to the country and having children actively makes people more conservative (surprisingly little evidence supports this- other than in times of economic crisis, very few people switch parties after age 24), the self-packing problem should solve itself over the next decade in most metro areas.

I think there will eventually be a nationalized 2:1 R white vote and the non-white vote will moderate a bit, but this won't be enough to save Republicans in states that are less than 60% white.

So Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas will move to the left of PA, MI, IA, MC, and WI for good? Wonder what will happen to VA, CO, WA, and OR. They keep trending Democrat.