What you are not looking at is that people as they get older tend to become more conservative. What do you expect young dumb kids to believe with TV shows promoting homosexual characters as innocuous? I was more liberal when I was younger. Not on gay marriage though no one had told me it was wrong. They didn’t have to it is just one of those things that is instinctively apparent. However on issues like socialism I was more receptive.
Today's "conservative" elderly voters are the same people that would be considered crazy liberals by their grandparents' standards. They have probably gotten divorced, accept their social security checks, gamble at the riverboat (the biggest demographic for casinos), and listen to rock 'n roll.
Society very, very rarely grows more conservative in an absolute sense. That's why I said to think otherwise is to live in a fool's paradise. The same people used that argument to believe that someday, the younger voters would realize women working was a bad idea or that blacks and whites shouldn't get married. It's faulty logic. People's beliefs get more ingrained as they get older, not less.