Neither of the current major party candidates is the "Grey Champion".

[Mikebert]

(08-27-2016, 05:47 PM)Einzige Wrote: Assuming that the GC has any validity as a concept as outlined in The Fourth Turning, it isn't applicable to either Clinton or Trump. 

The Book (doesn't one feel like a Friend of Bill, discussing it that way?) is pretty specific that what makes a Grey Champion a Grey Champion is overwhelming support from the ascending generation. It is the rising Hero generation, after all, that enshrines a Grey Champion's exploits in the annals of Valhalla and records their deeds in the Book of Life &etc. &etc. 

Abraham Lincoln certainly had huge majorities among the rising Gilded in the non-seceded States (he very likely was not a Grey Champion of the Confederacy); the 'Lincoln Shouters' were a paramilitary organization consisting of nothing but male youths in the Union states. And while I haven't been able to find any primary documentation on the demographics of the 1932 election, the overwhelming impression I get from secondary sources is that Franklin Roosevelt was the overwhelming favorite of the G.I. Generation at the time, not the least because of the Democratic promise to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.

You notice my repeated use of the word "overwhelming"?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump runs a serious risk of coming in fourth place in the youth vote, while Hillary is struggling to match the youth enthusiasm Obama had in his two elections. If we judge potential Grey Champions on the support they muster from the newly-minted Heroes, neither of the two nominees this year qualify. Indeed, it's increasingly plausible that Obama will look very much like a traditional Grey Champion in hindsight. The difference may be something as simple as a reverse Civil War crisis - where many observers include most or all of the 1850s in the Fourth Turning of that Crisis (creating a lengthy head in front of the emergence of the Grey Champion), this Crisis may simply have seen a Grey Champion leave office with a tail of Crises behind him, with nothing really resolved.

I don't see how you can derive the generational makeup of the electoral coalitions in 1860 and 1932 in the absence of data.  It's unknowable.  I doubt very much that S&H had the election in mind.  Rather I think they focused on the views of Civil War heroes and GIs to Lincoln and FDR when they were president.  FDR for one ran on a right-wing platform. Obviously, he was lying, but then he had appointed a Judge who allegedly had bought his position for $30K (about $2 million in today's money). They just didn't care.