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Media Got It Wrong: Young Generation Did Vote

Posted by jamie on from the whoops-they-did-it-again dept.

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.

5 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. On the other hand by Dachannien · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. As a member of the Religious Right... by RealProgrammer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    sigs, as if you care.
    1. Re:As a member of the Religious Right... by Darth_Burrito · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As a young columbus resident, I heard all the appeals from P-Diddy, Chris Rock, John Kerry, and everyone else at least once each every day ... on my phone ... at my door ... on my tv.

      I think we had 7 messages on our answering machine the day before elections and those are just the times we didn't answer the phone. We would see a canvaser a day at our door every day of the week leading up to the election. Sometimes there would be several in one a day.

      What was the effect of this? We developed a strong hatred for anyone invading the privacy of our home in order to tell us to go vote. We'd tell them everyday, yes, we're voting, we put up a frickin political sign in are yard... but still they would come back day after day after day. At the end of it all, my room mate was actually threatening not to vote if people didn't stop pestering us.

      It was harassment.

  3. Thank God by MarkPNeyer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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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    My blog
  4. Yeah, of course by philthedrill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.