Conservatives can't just lean on a debunked Churchill line, hoping millennials start leaning right

No, Winston Churchill did not say, "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

And good thing he didn't, or he'd have been completely, terribly, utterly wrong.

For the better part of the last decade, I've been waging war on this misconception. Why? It gives people on the right of the political aisle an excuse to shrug off concerns that the millennial generation is left-leaning in its politics. It offers the appealing illusion that the slow passage of time and setting in of reality is the only ingredient necessary for turning today's naïve little liberals into tomorrow's wise and rational conservatives.

Nonsense. And fresh data from the Pew Research Center underscores the extent to which the kids these days, and their counterparts in "Generation X", are not only not making the hoped-for slow march toward the political right, but drift ever more leftward, even as they age.

The young may lean left today, the old may lean right, but according to Pew's new study of tens of thousands of voters, the last 15 years have only widened the gap. Rather than showing all generations on parallel tracks, gradually evolving toward conservatism and the GOP as time passes, both the millennial generation (roughly: those born in the 1980s and 1990s) and Generation X (the folks sandwiched between millennials and 1964's late Boomers) have gotten more liberal in the last decade.