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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.
... that young people are statistically less likely to vote than middle aged and older people, even if turnout compared to last time was up. There must be ways to get the MTV generation interested in politics, after all, it's rather important - but so far, attracting them seems to have eluded most of the Western World's democracies.
and they all said the same thing as this article: more people voted across the board. Even though the number of youth voters increased, it is still an embarrasment! There was a huge push to get the youth to vote & no such push for older people (conspiracy theories regarding gay marriage ammendments aside). Yet obviously that push didn't do much!
Anyone have a graph, %Kerry versus average reg.voter age by state? NY is old, yet went Kerry. TX is young, yet went Bush.
a msn*.* new article I deicde that a news source field in each /. story would be a good idea, and new source modding would be a great idea.
:-) in fairness, they are either reporting the truth, but selectively, or even worse, not reporting certain areas.
/. is good, many many news sources. And news.google.com of course.
Something like:
if newsource contains [ MSN ] then [ -6 ]
This is why
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
As it turns out... the Media did say that numbers were up, but not percentage of the vote. I clearly recall hearing that election night. What the author of this article is hearing is the constant repetitive nature of 24hr news networks. You crazy Dems. are gonna have to live up to the fact that your party base would rather Stay at Home then vote if it ment them going through rain, or waiting in line.
As a college freshman at RIT, I can tell you first hand that people here still do not think their vote counts. That is, if they are not from a swing state. I didn't meet one person who was from a swing state who didn't vote, but I met numerous from the state's that were considered to be "taken" by one candidate or the other.
Students just felt that it was a waste of time voting in these states. It's hard to convince them to take the time when the winner is essentially decided. They don't get it that they are contributing to the popular vote, making their opinion known, and helping to ensure there is no upset in that state. Unfortunately nobody is sending these messages over the media. All students hear is "Vote or Die," and "Rock the vote," which came here and perpetuated the feeling that both sides just talk and talk, but never listen by having two large sheets of paper where people could write their opinions. There was a Kerry paper and a Bush paper, and all that came out of it was how much Bush sucks, or how much Kerry flip-flops, or how there is no paper for Nader and that Rock the Vote perpetuates a two party system.
What the young need is a new approach to get them to vote. One that emphasizes how much their vote counts, rather than how cool it is to vote, or how P-Diddy and his gang of thugs will kill you if you don't vote. The big names and celebrities should still be involved, they are great at getting a message out to people, however they need to reform their message to one that more accurately addresses the reasons young people do not vote.
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.
I suspect that the only thing that makes the Kerry supporters look good is that the researchers are focusing on misperceptions that would be most likely held by Bush supporters. I don't think it would take much to reveal the Kerry voters to be similarly misinformed, and for practical purposes, the Bush voters to be much closer to the truth.
For example, ask the average Kerry supporter if Iraq supported international terrorism. I suspect that the answer is NO, since they have had drummed into them that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The fact is that Iraq was a significant sponsor of international terrorism. Iraq paid for Palestinian suicide bombers. It offered refuge to a number of the most notorious terrorists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It offered refuge to Zarqawi (the guy giving us fits in Falluja). The Bush voter may be wrong in that Iraq didn't have close ties to Al Qaeda, but in the more general sense they are right since Iraq was a significant sponsor of international terrorism. The Kerry voter may be right in the narrow sense that there was no known close ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but in the more important general sense of supporting terrorism, they are wrong.
The same hold true for WMD. While the reports show that there was no actual manufacturing of WMDs going on, it is also clear that Saddam was nursing what was left of his programs, trying to retain expertise & equipment, and expand dual-use technologies. The was no doubt on the part of the Iraqis that Saddam wanted to restart his WMD programs as soon as he could shake off the sanctions. Iraq actually was building new missiles that were banned. In general, Saddam was not acting in good faith. And I think it is worth noting that there are a growing number of WMDs that have been recovered in Iraq since 2002, at least 30 or so that I know of. That is not a militarily significant number, and they are generally left-overs. However they are plenty good for use by terrorists. Now, the Bush voter might say Saddam had WMDs. In the narrowist possible sense, they are right. In the normal sense of looking for militarily significant stockpiles, they are wrong. In the more general sense, they are closer to the truth than the average Kerry voter. The average Kerry voter would say that Saddam didn't have them, and indeed never had them. The average Kerry voter would say this despite the fact that it is well established that Saddam manufactured enormous amounts of chemical weapons and used them against Iran and his own people. Iraq developed biological weapons, including anthrax bombs.
The same pattern holds in international relations. The average Bush voter would be literally wrong if they believe that the US invasion of Iraq had the support of the majority of the world. The average Kerry voter would be wrong if they really believe that it was literally a unilateral action. The US went to the UN repeatedly on the matter. There were something like 60 countries that aided the invasion in some way, and about 30 that sent in troops, no matter how small the number. 60 / 30 nations is only a fraction of the world. 60 / 30 is not unilateral.
Although the Bush and Kerry voters both tend to get some aspect of the questions wrong, the Bush voters are generally closer to a more useful general understanding of the problems than the Kerry voters.
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