WSJ, MSNBC Paint an Inaccurately Grim Portrait of First Time Voters

The Wall Street Journal, NBC and MySpace released a new poll today examining the attitudes of "new" and "lapsed" voters. The poll is unique in that it breaks out these two under-reported groups, however news coverage of the results by both The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC paint an overly grim picture of the potential turnout among these voters that is unsupported by the data.

In her WSJ story today on the poll, Sara Murray writes:

The survey, conducted by the Wall Street Journal, NBC News and the MySpace networking Web site, also found these voters have distinctly more positive impressions of Sen. Obama than any of the other three candidates atop the Democratic and Republican tickets.

But that hardly means the Obama campaign can count on them. When asked to rank their interest in the Nov. 4 election, just 49% said they were "very interested." By comparison, 70% of voters of all age groups said they were "very interested," according to a separate Journal/NBC News national poll taken a week ago.

Moreover, 54% of the new voters said they would definitely vote Nov. 4.

Murray is cherry picking her data here. Looking at the internals of the poll, respondents were asked to rank the likelihood of their voting on a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 being "definitely voting" and 1 being "definitely not voting." It's true that 54% responded with a 10, but what Murray leaves out is that 30% more respondents chose "8" or "9" - pretty high numbers on the scale. That means that 84% of respondents were very likely to vote. If you add in any respondents above "5", that number jumps 90%.

When it comes to interest in the election, Murray made the same editorial decision, including only respondents who answered with a "10" on a 10 point scale. Adding in the "8s" and "9s" again, and we see that 78% of respondents were very interested in the election, far higher than the 49% cited in the article.

In both instances, Murray uses only the most extreme levels of support in her examples. That had the effect of driving down the overall numbers and raised doubts about turnout among new and lapsed voters. While that may have fit her storyline, it was far from an accurate representation of the poll's findings.

Recognizing that we shouldn't automatically equate young voters with "new and lapsed" voters (though there is much overlap and both the WSJ and MSNBC blur the distinction), I want to point out that when you add in the additional response data, the broad trends here echo polling released by Rock the Vote in recent weeks. In a survey of young voters conducted in September, Rock the Vote found that 87% of young voters were following the election either "closely" or "very closely." They also found that 86% of young voters were either "likely" or "extremely likely" to vote this year. These numbers are almost identical to those found in the WSJ/NBC poll once you add in the very clearly interested respondents cut out of the article.

What's more, when discussing both statistics, Rock the Vote and their pollster Celinda Lake took a decidedly different view of their meaning. In a recent conference call presentation of the poll, Lake noted that the results are at record highs and are backed by favorable trends from the previous elections. In 2006, only 69% of young people stated that they were likely to vote. The results that November? A Democratic landslide in which young voters played a key role in the elections of Jon Tester, Jim Webb, and Joe Courtney. Just this past February, Rock the Vote found that 80% of young people were interested in the election. The corollary at the polls? In primary after primary contest we saw youth turnout double, triple, and even quadruple over turnout from previous years.

Murray's interpretation takes none of this recent history into account (emphasis mine):

These new voters are being closely watched by both political parties this fall. Regular Wall Street Journal/NBC News national polls indicate that these first-time and returning voters could account for between 10% and 13% of the November electorate.

The findings of the survey underscore the opportunities and the hurdles that face the Obama campaign. It has spent millions of dollars to register voters, as well as on plans to get them to the polls.

Traditionally it has been highly difficult for campaigns to get newly registered voters, especially young ones, to show up on Election Day.

It's not hard to get young people to show up on election day, it's just that neither party, and only very few candidates, ever put in the requisite work to do so. What we know from past election is that peer to peer outreach works in getting new voters to the polls - particularly young, first time voters. We know that such strategies have successfully increased the youth vote in the last three election cycles. And we know that Barack Obama is better than any candidate in decades at getting those voters to the polls.

The millions of dollars the Obama campaign sunk into youth registration and GOTV were well spent, and the campaign has reaped the rewards of those investments ever since new, mostly young, voters propelled him to victory in the Iowa caucuses.

The explosion of new voters isn't a hurdle for Obama, it's an opportunity. The fact that these unlikely and first time voters are so excited about this election is a chance to reach out our hand and welcome them into the political process. The Obama campaign understands this. Young organizers, who have worked for 5 years to bring the youth vote to the forefront understand this. Some people in the media still don't get it.