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

Doesn't change the fundamental fact...

[Ianoo]

... 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.

Re:Doesn't change the fundamental fact...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a combination of poor candidates ("Yeah Bush sucks, but is Kerry any better?"), general apathy ("Does it really matter which one is president?"), and pessimism ("I live in a (red|blue) state, so my vote won't matter anyway").

Reason #1 is a current favorite among the media. The story now is that the Democrats lost because they've managed to systematically alienate pretty much every voter group in the country.

Reason #2 is my personal favorite, meaning the one which most worries me. Kerry was utterly unable to separate himself in terms of his policies from Bush on any important issue. His main arguments were about differences of rationale rather than differences of policy. Was going to war in Iraq wrong? No, but the way we did it was wrong. Was a huge budget deficit wrong? No, but the way we spent it was wrong. And so on. A President Kerry would've done all the same stupid shit Bush has done, and will doubtless continue to do. He'd just have given different reasons for it.

As for reason #3, well, that applies to every age group. Not really any way around it in a country this big. It may affect younger voters more because our parents, as a generation, are not fans of this country. So we have less patriotism than past generations and feel it's less of a civic duty to vote. You know, if the government's just going to do its own shit regardless of what we say, what's the point to even having an opinion?

Personally, I think the solution is not refusing to vote, but instead voting for someone who hasn't got a chance in hell of winning. 60% or so of our country voted. If the remaining 40% came out and threw away their votes like that, would it affect the outcome? Yeah, if we all voted for the same guy, but really what it would accomplish is sending a message. Not to the politicians, who are too thick to get any message that's not wrapped around a 2x4, but to the other voters: You don't have to settle!

It's all a pipe dream, of course. We're locked into mediocre, functionally identical candidates for the rest of time, but it's a nice dream. And so I act as if I had any effect on that dream coming to pass, even though I don't.

The Media Outlets I Follow Reported Percentages

[Noksagt]

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!

More Young must have Voted Republican

[redelm]

... in the privacy of the voting booths. Otherwise, Kerry'd've won.

Anyone have a graph, %Kerry versus average reg.voter age by state? NY is old, yet went Kerry. TX is young, yet went Bush.

Yeah, of course

[philthedrill]

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.

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.

They still don't think their vote counts

[KevinIsOwn]

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.