The great grey hope of Republicans

Do people get more conservative as they age?

Some people answer this question with a resounding 'Yes!'

Fortunately, we have 40 years worth of Presidential exit polls to use to try to poke around at this question. I say we can 'poke around' because we can't actually get an answer to this question as written using the exit polls, for reasons that will become clear in a bit. But we can answer a more utilitarian variant of this question: Do voters from a specific generation tend to vote more Republican as that generation gets older?

The answer: No.

Below, I've taken all the exit poll data by age and plotted it up. For example, voters age 18-24 in 2008 voted 66% for Obama. This data point can be found as a green hexagon in the upper right-hand corner, at 66% Democratic and birth year 1987. For clarity, only the midpoint birth year is shown for each data point, and not the full age range.
 

The first and most obvious thing to notice is how very different voters born after ~1970 are from those who have preceded them. For years now, young voters have been dismissed as overly idealistic flakes who will vote Republican like they're supposed to once they settle down. But the youngest voters of the 1996 election have now supported the Democratic candidate over the Republican for five elections in a row. And by now, they're not so young anymore.

The second thing that immediately jumps out is how 'swingy' voters born before 1940 have been. Join me below for a more detailed look at generational voting patterns, including how (by one measure) Baby Boomers are more Republican than their parents, and a look at how voters from a given generation change over time.