Children of the Silent Majority: Young Voters and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1980

The 1972 U.S. presidential election, which Richard Nixon won in a landslide, reflected his campaign's commitment of quietly and effectively wooing twentysomethings and donating millions to his special interest group Young Voters for the President (YVP). Many who were drawn to Nixon and stayed aboard throughout the 1970s ended up supporting Ronald Reagan in 1980. Blumenthal (Coll. of Arts and Sciences, Boston Univ.) crafts a finely wrought study of this underappreciated segment of the mostly white, educated American electorate, who have been stereotyped as a generation of liberal flag-burners but were instead much more conservative than historians have often suggested. Blumenthal's history provides an important corrective to the conventional narrative of the period, showing how Nixon's views on law and order, foreign policy, and Christian evangelism shaped a generation of voters and transformed future elections and Republican dominance through the 1980s.