Carville's stale brand.

• Author: Adler, Ben
• Position: James Carville's 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation - Book review

40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation

by James Carville, with Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza

Simon & Schuster. 224 pages. $24.

Is the youth vote a great investment in a party's political future or a mirage not worth chasing? In the 2008 election, the media could not seem to get its story straight. For every cover in Time proclaiming 2008 the triumphant "Year of the Youth Vote," there was a grizzled veteran on the op-ed pages or CNN to argue that the youth vote has always been the dog that never barks.

And, remarkably enough, the election did not settle the dispute. Youth turnout increased, but so did older voters' turnout by almost as much, so the share of the electorate represented by voters under thirty years old went up only 1 percentage point. But young voters' preference for Barack Obama by staggering margins was essential to his victory, especially in the primaries.

Now, no less a pundit than James Carville has stepped into the breach with his new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation , an extended boast that demographic trends, particularly the partisan preferences of young people, will ensure an era of Democratic dominance.

"A Democratic majority is emerging," Carville declares. "This majority will guarantee that the Democrats remain in power for the next forty years."

Carville chose this seemingly arbitrary time span on the basis of his historically dubious assertion that American politics tends to go in cycles, with alternating spans of thirty-six or forty years of dominance. That proceeds from the fact that Republicans won most Presidential elections from 1896 to 1932, Democrats from 1932 to 1968, and Republicans since then.

There are many components to Carville's thesis. He mentions the declining share of white male voters and the increasing share of unmarried voters and Latinos. On every major issue of the day, Carville declares the Democrats' position both correct on the merits and popular with the public, with the Republicans being woefully out of touch. And he seems confident that recent headlines of Republican corruption and incompetence will reverberate through the 2044 election. But his number one reason for the coming Democratic domination is "the historically diverse, historically Democratic young people who will be the foundation for a lasting Democratic majority."

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C arville is, by his biography, an unlikely champion of younger voters. Made famous...