Mississippi Numbers - Youth Vote More Than Triples

I'm in San Francisco today, running on about 4 hours of sleep and the time change is starting to get to me. I'll be at Cody's in Berkeley tonight to give a brief talk and Q&A about my book. Hopefully I'll be coherent.

Via CIRCLE, the youth turnout trends we've seen since the primaries began continued yesterday in Mississippi, where the youth turnout more than tripled. In 2000, the turnout rate for young voters was a meager 4%. Yesterday it climbed to 14%. Young people made up 13% of all voters in Mississippi.

As we've seen in the past, young voters overwhelmingly participated in the Democratic Primary by a greater than 4 -1 margin. 57,161 young people voted in the Democratic Primary, up from just 6,202 in 2000, and they were 14% of the Democratic electorate. On the Republican side, the GOP also saw an increase in youth turnout, though a far less significant one. 13,512 18 - 29 year olds voted in the GOP primary, up from 9,198. They were just 10% of the Republican electorate. The disparity here between Dems and Republican turnout is somewhat greater than usual, but that is likely due to the fact that the GOP nomination is now locked up by Sen. McCain.

Looking deeper into the Democratic numbers, there are few surprises. Young people chose Sen. Obama 73 - 25 percent. This margin was basically unchanged among both the older and younger cohorts of 18 - 29 year olds. There are no data for white or latino youth, but among black youth - who constituted a majority of young voters in the state - Sen. Obama's margin was even greater at 90 - 10 percent.

In short - more of the same . . . we're really just waiting to add up the numbers and see who's got what. I do hold out some hope that Pennsylvania will give us real movement towards one candidate or the other, as well as for a youth turnout on par with that from Iowa and New Hampshire, which are still standouts for youth participation. We've got 6 weeks before PA goes to the polls. That's a lot of time to do the kind of face-to-face campaigning that happened in the early states.