Ned Lamont

With record total turnout of over 275,000, Ned Lamont defeated incumbent Joe Lieberman in this week's Democratic Party Primary for Senator in Connecticut. The margin of victory was 3.8%, a tight race. Exit polling reveals that voters under the age of 30 were the critical difference for Lamont:

Graphic from politicalarithmetik. The break for the 18 - 29 bracket is 63% Lamont.

Without the big break from millenial Nutmeg-staters, the power of incumbency would have kept Holy Joe in office.

Don't count on the trad media to pick this up, but those of us paying attention realize this is further evidence that the vanguard Millennials are shaping up to be a a powerful backbone for the future progressive majority. In 2004 we saw that under-30 turnout made Kerry competative. In 2006, we're going to see that same generational cohort start to win races.

Atrios reinforces my point from the other day:

It's pretty fascinating that over 100,000 people have clicked through to watch a campaign ad. During the whole FEC hearing process one of the big concerns by the people who wanted to regulate the internets was that if we didn't then people (horror!) might put candidate videos and stuff online and that would be bad because... well, I was never quite sure but it was going to be bad.

With Youtube and similar services anyone can slap video online for free. While the video in question is an official campaign video, Lamont supporters have been putting up all kinds of campaign-related videos. It's all good.

If you click through, he's got links.