GOP NATIONAL CONVENTION : Baby Boomers, Despite 40% of the Vote, Rarely Unite to Support Their Own Kind

Baby boomers now make up 40% of the American electorate, and by choosing Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his running mate George Bush said he hopes to attract enough of them to capture the White House in November.

“Do I need help in this area? Sure,” Bush told a press conference Wednesday. “And have I gotten it by the selection of a young, experienced United States senator? I think so.”

Campaign chairman James A. Baker III called it “a bold stroke across generations.”

Baby boomers--those 70 million Americans born between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s--indeed tend to view things somewhat differently than middle-aged and older Americans, many pollsters have found.

But the key question for Bush is whether these younger voters will be drawn to 41-year-old Quayle--the first baby boomer ever to run on a major party ticket--because of his age. And there is little evidence, based on past voting history, that they will.

Never a Bloc

“The baby-boom vote never has materialized into a bloc,” said Los Angeles Times political analyst William Schneider. Another analyst, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, said: “The notion that Dan Quayle is going to help Bush here is at least slightly misguided.”

William Carrick, manager of Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt’s unsuccessful campaign in the Democratic presidential primaries this year, declared: “I think there’s a quantum leap in logic to say that because Quayle is a baby boomer he’s going to attract the baby boomers. There’s no electoral history of those people voting for one of their own.”

The examples of baby boomers supporting politicians far outside their age group are numerous:

--Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., at age 39 a baby boomer himself, ran 10 points worse among that group in the Super Tuesday primaries this year than he did among middle-aged and older voters.

--Baby boomers currently have a more favorable impression of 77-year-old President Reagan than do the older voters, according to a July survey by the Los Angeles Times Poll. The baby boomers in 1984 voted for Reagan over Democrat Walter F. Mondale in about the same proportion as did older Americans.

--Two years ago, baby boomers supported 72-year-old California Sen. Alan Cranston over Republican challenger Ed Zschau by a huge margin. But the older voters backed the 46-year-old Zschau. So Cranston owed his narrow victory to the baby-boomer vote.

Sen. Gary Hart was favored by baby boomers over Mondale in the 1984 presidential primaries, but Hart himself was not a baby boomer.

‘Terrible Misconception’

Hart’s pollster, Patrick Caddell, said, “there’s a terrible misconception about generational politics--that somehow people vote because somebody is a certain age.” Actually, people vote for a candidate based on “shared values and shared experiences,” he said.

Caddell, in a telephone interview from Los Angeles where he is writing a book on the future of American politics, theorized that Bush’s selection of Quayle may well have been “very smart and very bold.”

Caddell theorized that Bush probably is using Quayle as “a symbol to try to get to the ‘future’ issue--’We are the party of the future. We care about the future. We want to build on Reagan’s success, but there’s more to do.’ If he gets to the future issue, he’s going to win the election. Because (Democrat Michael S.) Dukakis’ hold on that issue is very tenuous.”

In the recent Times poll, baby boomers were slightly more supportive of Dukakis than were older voters.

Karlyn Keene, editor of Public Opinion magazine, said that Republican candidates have a very good chance of capturing baby boomers, particularly the younger ones.

Baby boomers basically are divided into two groups: roughly two-thirds of them were born from 1946 to the mid-1950s, and the remainder from then until 1964.

The older group, Keene noted, “developed their first thoughts of politics with Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ (a book detailing the dangers of pesticide pollution), the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the riots in New York and Chicago. Then came Vietnam and Watergate. That made them a little more cynical about government and about politics, certainly than the group that followed them.

“Right now,” Keene continued, “they’re in their peak child-bearing age. They’ve got marriages, they’ve got mortgages and they’ve got kids. And those tend to be stabilizing or conservatizing influences. They still are fairly liberal to moderate on life style, but there’s a conservatism on other matters.

“As Winston Churchill said, if you’re not a socialist at 20 you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 40 you have no head.”

‘Formative Experience’

The younger baby boomers, Keene said, went through their “formative experience” politically during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. “They saw the country as incompetent at home and impotent abroad,” Keene said. “This became Reagan’s strongest group.”

Times Poll Director I. A. Lewis noted that “there are a number of economic issues that strike a harmonic chord with these baby boomers, and that’s one of the reasons why they were attracted to Reagan in the first place. But they are politically independent and on social issues they tend to be more anti-establishment and tolerant of other peoples’ life styles. They could go either way in November.”

Caddell said that Bush and Quayle could “terrify” baby boomers if they campaign a lot on social issues, such as abortion.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) observed Wednesday during a delegate discussion group assembled by The Times that Quayle’s “youthfulness gets his foot in the door with the young voters, just like Congresswoman (Geraldine A.) Ferraro’s gender got her in the door with women voters (as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984). But, beyond getting the foot in the door, it’s a matter of what he says. It’s a matter of what the issues are.

Step in the Door’

“If you can get that one step in the door to get people to listen, it’s a big advantage. Then you have to perform,” Specter said.

Surveys by the Times Poll have shown that baby boomers this year are a lot more satisfied “with the way things are going” than older voters are. But, probably because of their “formative years” during the Vietnam War, they also are more worried about the United States getting into a war in Central America.

Baby boomers are more liberal on racial issues than older voters. But they are more conservative on the need for a tax increase to control the federal budget deficit.

The challenge for both Bush and Dukakis is that almost one-third of the baby boomers are not registered to vote, compared to only about one-fifth of middle-aged and older Americans.