“If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty-five, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re thirty-five, you have no brain.” Winston Churchill never actually said these words. But, if they continue to live on as a popular slogan, it’s probably because they capture a common attitude about the correlation between political idealism and age. The young, or so this story goes, are invariably drawn to the novelty and transgression of progressive or even radical ideas — a disposition that usually dissipates with age. There’s a decidedly unsubtle, patronizing implication here, the idea being that conservatism is arrived at through experience and is thus synonymous with maturity.

Anecdotally, at least, there are real reasons for people to assume politicization works this way — among them the trajectory of the generation that began to come of age in the 1960s. The actual empirical evidence, however, suggests a lot more variation in the political values (and voting habits) of the young, old, and middle-aged alike. In 1980, Ronald Reagan basically drew even with Jimmy Carter when it came to voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine — winning the same demographic in a landslide upon reflection four years later. Margaret Thatcher actually got more support in her 1983 electoral rout from those between thirty-five and forty-four than from people over sixty-five and also won more than 40 percent of first-time voters.

The formation of political identity is ultimately a lot more complicated than what’s implied by the oft-assumed trajectory from youthful idealism to hardheaded maturity. The collective experiences of particular generations and groups of people can make them more or less radical or conservative depending on the circumstances. In this respect, the findings of a new Axios/Momentive survey are striking but in many ways unsurprising.