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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.
Exit polls revealed that while the youngest age group still formed the same proportion of the voting population that it did in 2000, the next older group voted in a substantially lower proportion, and the oldest two groups voted in a somewhat higher proportion.
Ultimately it's a matter of playing with numbers and interpreting the results in whatever way makes you feel good. In this case, the people involved in youth voter drives are spinning the numbers to say that their efforts actually did something, when really nobody can say one way or another what factors actually influenced the youth vote.
This is intended to be 'interesting', nothing more.
As a conservative Christian, I heard all the appeals from the Hollywood Left (Bruce Springsteen, Snoop Doggy Dog, MTV, et al) and thought, "Man, I'd better make sure to vote! The college kids are going to turn out and who knows what will happen!"
Perhaps the Get Out the Vote campaign was more effective than they thought.
sigs, as if you care.
Allow me to say "Thank god" - young people are idiots. I say this with certainty because I am one of them. Most of us have the attention span of gnats and would have been making votes based on stupid ideas - the draft? Give me a goddamn break, MTV. The whole 'Rock The Vote' charade was a thinly veiled attempt to get young people afraid they were going to be drafted if George W. Bush stayed in power. When I told people it was a democrat that introduced a draft bill into congress, it was democrats who voted for it, and that it was john kerry who called for mandatory service, they would go 'oh' and realize they'd been duped. If you want to get young people interested in the political process, telling them to 'vote or die' and filling their head with rediculous lies isn't the best way to do it.
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If you don't think these kind of things are important, it is because you fell for the spin of a Bush campaign. Things aren't very good domestically or abroad, but if you can convince enough people that Bush and Kerry are pretty much the same, those people will tend to conclude that obviously it would be smarter to stick with who is already there. It is one of the many things that helped put this guy back in office.
Of course, when they're giving the stats in relative percentages, the numbers don't tell the whole story. Yet people were quick to make a judgment call before working out all of the numbers.
With that said, I would have liked to see an even higher turnout. I've read that the national turnout was roughly 60% according to this article.
But part of that was because Wisconsin had high voter turnout (see here), which was 72% statewide and 80% in Dane County (where Madison is). I guess I should blame myself since the campaigns really focused on the swing states... I'm sure the youth turnout in the non-swing states wasn't nearly as high.
This article says the same thing as this post, except it noted towards the end that most of the youth voters are in or have attended college. The non-college youth are the people that I'd like to see vote.
OK. First of all: I was against the ammendments & didn't vote for Bush (though I'm not gay and am an independent who has voted for republicans & did vote for some in the last election).
I haven't heard Rove or anyone else say that the ammendments were planned in order not to outlaw gay marriage, but to elect Bush. Please provide such evidence. I grant you that it is no secret that many for Bush were in favor of the ammendments, but correlation doesn't mean causation. And I've heard none try to claim that Bush, Rove, the RNC, or the citizens who voted for these ammendments aren't genuinely in support of them.
Also: I am skeptical that this would cause voters to come out of the woodwork in order to vote for Bush, especially in moderately liberal states such as Oregon. Why didn't the ammendment cause sympathetic liberals to show up in larger numbers too? I would have predicted this to be more likely, especially as the turnout for youth voters and other demographics who would be more inclined to be against the ammendment & against Bush & who often don't vote would showup in outrage of the ammendment.
The sad truth is that people are just less tolerant and more close-minded abouit marriage than either you or I would like to admit. But there is a very long way to go to try to prove the theory.
So continue believing what you will, as long as you strive for education and compassion.
There have been quite a few stories in the mainstream media in the last couple of years about how young adults are growing more conservative. That might be part of what is going on.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
2. Because someone they love might have kids, and they care for them.
3. Because someone they love might be retiring sometime soon, and they care for them.
It's not all about "me, me, me!", you know. I wonder how you voted... ;)