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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.
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.
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.
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.
My blog
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.
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.
They are too lazy to actually do any real research, and the GOp probably wanted to dampen any bnadwagon effect, and fed the media that no-youth-vote spin, and the media reported it, like the good little lapdogs they are.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon