Newsweek, Tea Leaves, and Young Voters

I wanted to jump out ahead of this one. Newsweek is reporting on the Obama campaign's courting of young voters and is using a new poll they commissioned to report that young voters are heavily favoring Barack in Iowa, yet their polling shows no such thing. Emphasis mine:

That's a tall order. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama trails Clinton 25-31 percent among all Iowa Democrats, but leads 28-24 percent among likely caucus-goers. The difference, according to previously unpublished results from the poll: 20 percent of those likely voters were under 30, compared to 13 percent of the wider Democratic pool—meaning that when caucus-goers skew young, Obama is leading. “If Obama really has the ability to go out and identify young voters and motivate them wherever they live, he would, in theory, be able to make a big difference,” says pollster Mark Blumenthal. "It's unlikely, but it's not impossible." It's important to note that the NEWSWEEK stats should be taken with a boulder of salt; caucuses are tricky to poll, and the small sample size makes for a big margin of error.

If you actually look at the poll, the margin of error among likely caucus-goers is a high 7%, putting Obama's "lead" among young people well within the margin of error. There is still not enough hard evidence to back up Obama campaign manager Plouffe's assertion that "Barack's support among Iowa young voters exceeded all the support of the other candidates combined ," and there is every reason to suspect that Obama has only a slight edge over Clinton among young Iowans. Newsweek should stop reading their polls like tea leaves and actually report on solid, conclusive findings.