CIRCLE

Charles Franklin at Pollster.com has an interesting analysis (with graphs) of the relationship between age, voter turnout, and share of the electorate.

Franklin argues that even though younger voters are turning out in greater numbers, and were a huge factor in making Kerry competitive in '04, they still turn out less reliably, and it's in Obama's best interest to court the 58+ crowd. It's a pretty evenhanded analysis and you should go read it.

That said, I have two bones to pick.

First, as I've often noted, young or older voters isn't an either or proposition. It's about balance. How do you allocate resources to each group and what is the most effective way to do that. Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, has, I think, the correct response:

To be sure, older voters are prime targets. No one would advise a campaign otherwise. The question is where an extra dollar of campaign money makes the most difference. I would not be surprised if the marginal impact is actually greater among the young. Youth voting rose proportionally in 2004 and made a difference in the campaign. That happened despite very modest levels of investment in youth voting by the Democratic Party and nominee. It's quite plausible that each dollar spent on youth paid off quite nicely. (See our estimates of cost-effectiveness here; although unfortunately we cannot compare impact by age group.)

This is something I've heard a lot recently from folks - that registration and GOTV of youth is cheaper than persuasion of older voters (usually because it requires far few contacts). Something to think about.

My second bone to pick is that I think Franklin isn't seeing the forest for the trees. Even if there is movement between parties among older voters, we know that for the most part people's partisan habits generally stay fixed after their first few major elections. Dollars spent reaching out to young voters now builds those loyalties and lays the groundwork for future elections. It builds the party and helps break the mutual cycle of neglect we've seen between American youth and the political process. That's a positive long-term benefit not at all considered in Franklin's analysis.

It's not necessarily Franklin's fault. His website is dedicated to polling analysis of the current race - not long term party building. But it's something that should be discussed as a potential ROI on youth outreach. Too often polling analysis misses that bigger picture.

Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, noted in his blog yesterday the Gallup poll that was released at the end of July showing Obama losing ground to McCain, even among youth. Levine correctly points out that Gallup's sample size of likely young voters was 10% when, in 2004, youth formed between 16% and 18% of the electorate. As Levine reminds us, young voters are usually always undersampled in "likely voter" polling screens due to little or no previous voting experience.

(Table courtesy of NationalJournal.com)

But I thought Levine's main point was very instructive: if youth are sampled at their 2004 rate or one similar, McCain loses. If they are sampled at this rate, he wins.

More directly -- if youth turn out, Obama wins. If they don't, McCain does. It doesn't get much more elementary or inspiring than that.

Mark Blumenthal at National Journal has a nice write-up on this, too.

CIRCLE has finally released their fact sheet summary of youth turnout in the presidential primary contests. The numbers are much the same as what we reported last week. Here's what you need to know:

• In the states for which data is available, 6.5 million young voters (17 - 29) participated in either the Democratic or Republican Presidential primaries.
• Overall turnout rose from 9% (recorded in 2000, the last comparable cycle), to 17%.
• This is the third consecutive cycle in which youth turnout increased.
• This is the first time youth turnout has increased three cycles in a row since 18 - 20 year olds were first granted the right to vote in 1971.
• In the 17 states for which comparable exit polling is available from 2000, all but one state (New York) saw an increase in youth turnout.
• Of those 17 states, 10 saw at least a 10 point jump in youth turnout (NH, MA, GA, MO, TX, TN, IA, MS, OH, OK).
• Obama captured the Democratic youth vote 60 - 38%.

Also remember from the Rock the Vote's fact sheet and last week's post mortem that young voter's share of the electorate rose from 9.4% in 2004 to 14.3% in 2008, and young voters participated in the Democratic primary over the GOP primary at a rate of 2 - 1.

The most interesting piece of new data in the CIRCLE report is the candidate breakdown in the GOP contest. More young Republicans voted against John McCain than voted for him, and he barely inched out Mike Huckabee to capture a plurality of youth votes among the top 4 candidates. As for Ron Paul - the so-called GOP youth candidate, he only received 10% of the youth vote. Can we finally put to rest the fiction that Ron Paul is the conservative youth candidate? At best he had a highly tech savvy core of youth supporters that amounted to very little at the polls.

It was reported yesterday that Congressman Paul is holding his own "shadow convention" this year. It will be interesting to see who shows up.

Still no word on data from CIRCLE . . . sorry. Waiting on them for my post-election recap.

• Rolling Stone skewers the Senate in The Senate Caves.
• Peter Levine - Director of CIRCLE - splashes some cold water on the idea that party identification forms early and hardens for life. Yikes, let's hope not.
• In the past I've had real disagreements with Courtney Martin's reading of today's youth activism, but she does us all proud in this op-ed for the Women's Media Center.
• The RNC tried to pull ahead of the DNC in the race for Facebook friends. It backfired hilariously. Full story at Tech President.
• Campaigns and Elections has released a list of Rising Stars Under 35. A few are familiar. Most are not. What do you think of the list?
• Apparently, in his quest to craft a "better" GI Bill than the one offered (and recently passed) by Jim Webb, John McCain didn't actually consult many veterans. You stay classy, McCain.

CIRCLE has crunched what numbers they could and here are the results from yesterday's primary:

There are a boatload of caveats that come with these stats. First, looking at the turnout number (14%), it needs to be noted that this is a low-ball number. CIRCLE doesn't just calculate the turnout within the Democratic Primary, they calculate it for the entire electorate. Last night there were no exit polls for the Republican primary, making it impossible for CIRCLE to crunch the data on that side of the aisle. So the 14% comes purely from Democratic turnout, but it's representative of the entire electorate. If CIRCLE were able to add in data from the Republican turnout, that number would surely rise.

Second, because there were no exit polls at all done in Pennsylvania in 2000 or 2004, we have no data against which to compare these numbers. We can, however, make a few very good guestimates.

What we do know is that turnout doubled in Pennsylvania last night, and that in 2004, the average youth "share of the electorate" was 9%. So in a year in which turnout doubled overall, young people gained a 3% greater share of all voters than they did in 2004. So youth turnout yesterday was likely more than double what it was in 2004.

As per usual, youth turnout also went heavily for Senator Obama. According to CNN Exit polling, 18 - 24 year olds broke for Obama 66 - 34%. Among 25 - 29 year olds the race narrowed, though Obama still carried the cohort 55 - 45%.

As I noted earlier in the week, Ohio and Pennsylvania are very demographically similar states. If Obama was to win or be competitive tonight, he needed youth to turnout be a greater share of the electorate in PA than it was in OH. That didn't happen. In Ohio, the youth share of the electorate was 3 percentage points higher, at 15% (pdf). There were likely a number of factors that kept youth turnout down.

There have been some reports of problems at the polling place, but a greater problem was likely the fact that many students - who have made up a disproportionately high number of young voters this cycle - missed the registration deadline, which bumped up against spring break, or they voted absentee in their home state during the previous contests. There is also the matter of brain-drain. Pennsylvania is one of the oldest states in the country, in no small part due to the fact that young college graduates leave the state to find work elsewhere. In other states, college-educated young voters have played a large role in boosting youth turnout.

While it's great news for Democrats, the Obama campaign, and youth activists that, in spite of those hurdles mentioned above, young voters turned out yesterday in greater numbers than every before, there was still room for growth. Young voters in PA made up 21% of the eligible electorate, so young people still did not vote in proportion to their share of the population. There was a 9% gap between what happened, and what was possible. Look at previous contests and you will see that this gap has occurred time and again this primary season. We've seen big gains - double, triple, even quadruple turnout - in every single state, but with the notable exceptions of Iowa and New Hampshire, these numbers have lagged behind young voters' share of the population.

Why is that so?

In Iowa and New Hampshire, which saw the largest share of the electorate and the largest turnout rate, respectively, among young people, youth organizers were moving full-steam ahead. Every 501c3, c4, and 527 was on the ground working to turn out young people. This has not been the case in the rest of the primary contests and caucuses. Progressive youth orgs just don't have the budget to run full youth campaigns during the primary season and no one thought this contest would go past February 5th. We were all caught unprepared for this and the youth vote in the remaining states is not turning out as much as it could be as a consequence.

There's a strong argument to be made here that the Obama campaign, for all the incredible work that it has done in energizing young people, needs help. It can't turn out the youth vote to the greatest degree possible on its own. It will need the support of outside youth organizations like YDA, The League, Young Voter PAC and more. If Obama donors who are maxed-out want to continue to help his candidacy, they could do a lot worse than directing some funds to these independent youth organizations that will be on the ground this cycle, and well after the polls close in November.

As I've said in my book and many times in the past, Millennials are a larger generation than the Baby Boom, and research shows that if you can get someone to vote for a party in their first three major elections, you can lock in their partisanship for life. Getting these young voters out now is about more than the Obama campaign. It's about building partisan loyalty and securing a progressive majority for the next 40 - 50 years. That's a worthwhile longterm investment.

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.

Book, conference, and personal stuff are piling up this week, so I won't have time to get to this until late tonight (or possibly the weekend), but Rock the Vote and CIRCLE have released a new, very comprehensive report on trends in the youth vote. Most impressive, the report looks to get down into some serious demographic nitty-gritty (see bold below). Some highlights from their press release:

The report, Young Voter Registration and Turnout Trends, takes an in-depth look at historical trends in youth voter turnout, the demographics of young voters, and the politics of the youth vote. The report offers research and data on young voters broken down by state, gender, ethnic group, religious affiliation and other key demographics for the 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006 elections. The complete report can be found at www.civicyouth.org or www.rockthevote.com/research.

Facts about youth electoral participation:

• Young voter turnout rose in the last two election cycles;
• In the 2004 presidential election, voter turnout increased for all groups of young people;
• Young voters are more ethnically and racially diverse today than 30 years ago, and are more diverse than their adult counterparts;
• Economy/Jobs and the Iraq War are the top two issues for young voters; and
• An estimated 44 million 18-29 year olds will be eligible to vote in 2008, constituting 21 percent of the eligible voting population.

The final numbers for the youth vote on Super Tuesday are in.

First, take a look at what turnout thus far tells us about the Democratic advantage among young voters. The data for 2000, 2004, and 2006 come from CNN exit polls. The data for 2008 is an projection of the Democratic advantage among young voters in November of 2008. The projection was determined by adding up the total number of young voters participating in the Democratic and Republican primaries thus far (Super Tuesday and previous contests all the way back to Iowa), and calculating the percent of the total number of voters that participated in the Democratic and Republican contests respectively. The data for this determination comes from CIRCLE.

As you can see, the Democratic advantage among young voters is huge and growing.

Partisan Breakdown of 18 - 29 Year Old Voters

This chart from CIRCLE's National Super Tuesday Fact Sheet (pdf) shows the actual turnout numbers in the Democratic and Republican Super Tuesday contests. It's a state-by-state representation of some of the data in the previous graph:

This next chart shows total youth turnout (Dem + Rep) in Super Tuesday states, compares turnout from 2000 to 2008, and notes the youth share of the electorate. Big take-away: youth turnout rate was up in every state for which comparative data exists.

Finally, a quick refresher on which candidate won the youth vote in each state on both the Republican and Democratic side. I've already discussed these results on the Democratic side.

On the Republican side, I thought it was interesting that Huckabee won the youth vote in more states than any other candidate, and he may even have won a larger share of the youth vote in raw numbers than either McCain or Romney. No offense to Ron Paul supporters, but more and more Huckabee looks like the youth candidate on the Republican side.

Updated at 3:40pm to reflect additional state returns.

Updated at 12:30 to reflect changes to the exit polling.

CIRCLE still has not posted results from Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Deleware, and New Mexico. And there seems to be no data at all available for all four of the Super Tuesday states that employed election day registration (Alaska, Idaho, Minnesota and North Dakota). But here's what we know so far about yesterday's youth turnout.

It was up, and in some states up big.

Youth turnout quadrupled in Tennessee. It tripled in Georgia, Missouri and Oklahoma, and it doubled in Massachusetts. There were, however, some states that didn't fare so well. In New York, youth turnout flatlined while turnout for the 30+ demographics dropped by 10 points, creating a net decline in voter turnout in the state.

As a share of the Democratic electorate, young voters increased their share in every state for which comparable data is available.

In most states, that increased turnout was to the advantage of Barack Obama, who won the youth vote in 13 12 of the 15 states for which data is currently available. The margin by which Obama carried young voters in those states varied wildly. In some states, like Georgia, he maintained his towering advantage over Clinton among young voters, and in Missouri, where he won by a mere 10,000 votes, young voters may well have been the difference in his campaign. In other states, though, like California, Clinton cut that advantage down to just a few points. Clinton actually won California. Guess the CNN exit polls are still adjusting.

Regardless of which candidate carries the nomination next month, that increased turnout will be a big advantage for Democrats in the general election. In Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York and Tennessee combined, 458,000 more young people voted in the Democratic contest than the Republican. The actual amount varied widely from state to state with Connecticut at the low end (~19,000 more Democratic youth participants) and New York at the high end (~203,000 more).

The one exception to this rule thus far was Oklahoma, in which 10,000 more young voters participated in the Republican primary than the Democratic primary.

All the data available thus far on youth turnout is pulled together in the chart below.

A quick word on methodology and data sets. In the chart below, the share of the electorate data and the turnout data come from two different sources (CNN and CIRCLE, respectively).

The Share of the Electorate data represents the youth vote share of the Democratic electorate - not the statewide electorate as a whole. The data on turnout represents total youth turnout across the state - both Democratic and Republican voters combined.

If you write about this or cite it, don't mix the apples and the oranges.

CIRCLE has a new fact sheet (pdf) that serves as an excellent refresher course on the youth vote so far in this nomination contest.

I've pulled out a few of the more compelling charts as a reminder of what we've seen so far. There is plenty more data in the full fact sheet.

Here's a view of turnout and share of the electorate of the youth vote compared to previous years. Note that this is for the Democrats and Republicans combined, and that in all the previous contests, the number of youth voting in the Democratic contest has outstripped the number participating in the GOP contest:

Here's a summary of how young voters in both parties have cast their ballots:

And my favorite chart, as this in part depicts the future of our country and the makings of a progressive majority, check out the race/ethnicity breakdown of the youth vote in each party's nominating contests:

For more information about the previous contests, you can check out my previous coverage of each state here: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan, Florida, South Carolina.