Was it the youth vote that propelled Dems to their big midterm victory this year? I’m afraid the data is a little confusing.
Kevin Drum has spent much of the week reporting on trends, or lack thereof, available in the exit polls. He describes the youth vote this year as “a fizzle.”
In 2004 Dems won 55% of the youth vote. This year they won 60%. That’s a swing of 5 points, exactly the same as the overall nationwide swing in favor of Democrats.
In fact, it’s actually worse than that: the number of young voters (age 18-29) decreased from 16% of the electorate in 2004 to 12% of the electorate in 2006. This means that in 2004 they amounted to 8.8% of the total Dem vote, compared to 7.2% in 2006.
Fine. I’m encouraged by the 60% support among younger voters, but percentage of the electorate suggests efforts to boost youth turnout may not have been a wild success. On the other hand, John Judis said younger voters were key, and their shift in the Dems’ direction was very significant.
In 2002, voters aged 18 to 29 split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This year, they backed Democrats by 63 to 33 percent. These voters won’t necessarily provide the numbers to win elections for the Democrats, but they can provide energy to revitalize the party. They write blogs, knock on doors, and encourage candidates, such as Montana’s Jon Tester or Northern California’s Jerry McNerny, neither of whom were initially taken seriously by party officials.
[Younger voters] don’t necessarily provide solutions to great policy questions; but they can force attention to problems that require solutions, as they did with the Vietnam war in the 1960s and the Iraq war today. As the unions have lost members and clout, their campaign work has been increasingly supplemented by young recruits from organizations like MoveOn.org.
Wait, it gets murkier.
While the exit polls showed the youth vote dropping as a percentage of the overall electorate, the Center for American Progress highlighted the youth vote as one of the year’s big success stories.
Young Americans under the age of 30 “voted in the largest numbers in at least 20 years in congressional elections” on Tuesday, energized by the war in Iraq. An estimated 10 million young Americans came out to vote, “an increase of two million since the midterm election in 2002.” The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) compiled the data through “exit polls and early published tallies of votes that are likely to increase as additional precincts and ballots are included.” CIRCLE Research Director Mark Lopez said it is unclear if the turnout is a record because there is no good comparable data before 1986.
“Estimated youth turnout jumped from 20 percent in 2002 to 24 percent in 2006,” but the youth turnout in the 1982-midterm elections reached 27 percent, which measured only voters ages 18-24. A poll by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics last week indicated that young voters turned out mainly because of the war in Iraq. The poll “showed that by a three-to-one margin, young Americans said the country was on the ‘wrong track.’” Forty-six percent of young people felt the country was on the right track in 2002, compared with a mere 18 percent in 2006. Another poll by Young Voter Strategies showed “increasing costs of college and student loans and crippling levels of student debt” also drove youth voters.
Oddly enough, I think everyone is probably right on this one. Young people are voting more Democratic, but so is everyone else. Young people turned out in greater numbers, but so did everyone else. The results are open to some interpretation.
The key, at least for me, was Judis’ apples-to-apples comparison of the youth vote from the ’02 midterms to the ’06 midterms — the youth vote went from split to nearly 2-to-1 Democratic. Maybe Bush is helping drive an entire generation of voters away from the GOP in droves?