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Top story in yesterday’s Rocky Mountain News was all about a new report issued on who did and didn’t vote in the Nov. 2004 election. The article is titled ’04 Vote Brought Out Young:
…The census survey found the number of Colorado voters aged 18 to 24 rose from 84,000 in 2000 to 212,000 in 2004. The percentage of all young residents who cast ballots rose from 21 percent in 2000 to 44 percent in 2004, on a par with national figures of 17 percent and 45 percent respectively.
While a mid-40%s turnout is by no means stellar, it does show that all the attention spent trying to get young people the polls paid off. Remember, according to the now infamous exit polls, the only age demographic group to vote for Kerry was the kids. By 10 points, the largest spread out of any age group.
I bring this the light to remind us all that the kids did show up to vote in 2004. Sure, they didn’t vote at the 71% rate the article says white males did, but don’t let anyone tell you the youth vote wasn’t there for Kerry. If you take all the people who voted, the youth vote took the same percentage slice of the pie, only because every other age demographic group (which are much larger in size) grew too. What’s important to watch is the rate of voter-turnout increase comparing a demographics group over each cycle.
The past election showed the youth, when engaged, will to interest, and will vote. 2004 must be the turning point for the way the Democratic Party engages the youth vote. What we did last was good. If we hadn’t, Bush would have “won” by an even larger margin. I know next time we can do it better.
This is especially important in Colorado, a state with a growing population and will be an even bigger battleground in ’08 then it was in ’04. People who vote once are much more likely to vote again. Also if we can get ’em to vote Dem now, we have a much better chance of them voting Dem in the future.
There was one not-so-good point to show:
Sigh. If we could get black adults to the polls as much as whites, we could add a couple million votes nationally. This shows that Dean is right by saying the Democratic outreach to blacks needs to be improved.
Just keep Katherine Harris away from the voter rolls.
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The youth turnout was definitely higher than I expected. It helped that the college groups demanded clarification of out-of-state student guidelines for voting, provided registration tables, and in some cases, fought to have a polling station on campus.
yup on the campus thing. I was @ ground zero, at the Ohio State University. You should have seen the lines to vote. My girlfriend had to wait 3 hours to vote.
It sucked she had to wait so long. At my precinct voter turnout increased 4x from the 2000 level. They had more people vote by 11AM then in the whole 2000 election.
on this for an impromptu lesson in one of my classes (community college level). Many of my students voted for the first time and were excited about participating.
After the election, numbers like these were often cited – “Fewer than one in 10 voters Tuesday were 18 to 24.”
Various vacuous talking heads in the MSM picked this up and reported it as “only 1 in 10 young people voted.” My students were distraught about the outcome and also about the failure of young people to vote, as they had heard reported. They asked me, how did this happen? Everyone I know my age voted. Where are all of these young people who didn’t vote?
We had a nice talk about how “fewer than one in 10 voters were 18 to 24” did not mean that only 1 in 10 18-24 year olds voted. Obviously, ANY 6-year span age group is going to be a small percentage of the total voters. What percentage of the total were the 38-44 year old voters? Or the 70-76 year old voters? Or the 55-61 year old voters? And so on.
It was a nice lesson in how someone on TV can be a total idiot about basic math and not to believe everything that’s reported by said idiots.
Sad though, that the lasting impression is that “young people didn’t vote. They’re apathetic. They’re selfish and just want to party. They don’t care.” Etc, etc.
totally agree.
As I said in the diary, the important statistic is the increase in voter-turnout in demographics group cycle over cycle. Youth voter turnout went from 17% to 45% from 2000 to 2004. That is great.
Keep up the work dispelling the MSM myths.
I think the real power of the youth in this country is often “misunderestimated”.