Media Got It Wrong: Young Generation Did Vote

Newsweek has a small story on MSNBC: Not Slackers After All?. It seems the media jumped to conclusions when it said, right after the election, that 18-to-29 year olds didn't turn out in record numbers. In fact, the participation of every age group was up, including young voters, but the youth vote wasn't up any more than other age groups, so the percentage was about the same from the 2000 election. I guess everyone rocked the vote.

Comments

Re:More Young must have Voted Republican

[Dachannien]

West Virginia is the "oldest" state in the Union, even older than Florida, but went Bush, despite its long-running history of being extremely pro-labor and generally very pro-Democrat. Of course, it also has the highest military recruitment rate of any state, and those people are almost exclusively in the youngest voting demographic.

Re:Thank God

[An Onerous Coward]

A few clarifications:

There are two draft bills, not one.

S.B. 89 has never gotten out of committee, so Democrats could never have voted for it.

H.R 163 was defeated 402-2, so even if both "for" votes were cast by Democrats, that's about 1% of all the mules in the House. To say "it was Democrats who voted for it" is misleading.

John Kerry's plan didn't call for mandatory military service. Instead, it provided incentives like college tuition. Republicans were quick to mischaracterize the term "national service", even though much of the plan was simply meant to increase volunteerism. Read more.

Re:Thank God

[goon america]

The whole Bush campaign for the last two years has been a thinly veiled attempt to get people to think that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were the same person. And, it worked: most Bush voters thought that there was proof they were working together, and also thought that WMD was found in Iraq, and that the war was popular worldwide.

Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions. (...)

Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, "One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree." Eighty-two percent of Bush supporters perceive the Bush administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63%) or that Iraq had a major WMD program (19%). Likewise, 75% say that the Bush administration is saying Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. Equally large majorities of Kerry supporters hear the Bush administration expressing these views--73% say the Bush administration is saying Iraq had WMD (11% a major program) and 74% that Iraq was substantially supporting al Qaeda.

link

Most surveyed agreed that it was the Bush administration who were origin of these beliefs. It drives me up a wall that these guys were able to win an election in part because they were able to successfully misinform people.