Adam C., a contributing editor at RedState, emails:

I just read your blog post on the youth vote. I think you should check out the shift in 2006. From 2000 to 2004, the shift was from D +2 to D +9. In 2006, the Congressional vote of under 30 voters was 60-38 (D +22). Of course half of the 2006 voters are different from the 2000 voters, but the trend is more dire for Rs than a glance at 2000 and 2004 makes it seem.

He's right, though the 18-29 cohort made up an even smaller percentage of last year's vote (12%) than '04 or '00 (Incidentally, I'm having trouble finding comparable numbers for '02).

To be clear, I'm not trying to challenge the assumption that younger voters are moving away from Republicans. That's probably true across all demographic groups at this point in time, and it may be especially true among the youngest voters.

However, I think the assumption that this shift represents "a political setback that could haunt Republicans 'for many generations to come,'" as Marinucci phrased it in the Chronicle, is just a tad far fetched. To the point of Jonah's column I quoted in my original post, we've heard this tune a number of times before in the past few decades, and it simply hasn't happened - at least in part because voters' world views tend to become more conservative as they grow older.