2006

Today, we all head to the polls to choose our representatives and hopefully change the direction of our country. One voting block that is sure to play an important - and expanding - role in today's election is young voters.

In 2004, the media completely botched the story about young voter turnout. An article in the AP mistakenly reported young voters share of the electorate instead of the hard turnout numbers. In 2004, youth turnout as a share of the electorate only rose 1-2% points due to an overall turnout increase of 4% among the voting population. Young Voter strategies has more on the difference between share and turnout here. (pdf)

The result of this error was a complete dismissal of youth turnout for months, and a reinforcement in the minds of many politicians and the media that youth remained apathetic. We know that's not true.

The real story, we now know, was that youth turnout increased by 11% over 2000 turnout levels, and that young voters chose Kerry over Bush by a 10 point margin. This was the largest increase since 18 year olds were granted the vote in 1972.(pdf)

To make sure that this little piece of electoral history doesn't repeat itself, I'd like to establish some baseline info about youth turnout - what to look for, and what we can expect today:

Google Bomb after the jump. Read what this is all about.

Over the past several weeks, I've been seeing posts on many a-list blogs pushing the narrative that "Kinky Friedman is a racist," or at least that "Kinkey is Pat Buchannan in a more colorful garb." Having some familiarity with Friedman as a cultural figure and as such taken some interest in his independent campaign for Governor, I was alarmed to see these posts.

My alarm turned to something more like disappointment and resignation though when I dug a little deeper and figured out this was a pretty poorly constructed negative campaign, trying to swing support to Democratic candidate Chris Bell, and that many of the people I enjoy and respect in the NetRoots were participating.

This coordinated negative push is mis-conceived and will be unproductive.

Living Liberally vs. Politically Correct
One of the better concepts to come out of the NetRoots is the "Living Liberally" meme. The idea here is that a liberal/progressive movement needs both a social foundation for its base, and an attractive/enjoyable culture to grow. This is a keen insight, and it's one of the things that makes the Drinking/Laughing/Screening Liberally family of events so valuable.

What's confusing and distressing to me is why people who understand the value of that can't see how they undermine the same process by participating in this negative campaign against Friedman.

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.

The Washington Post gets one right. Two years late, they finally wrote the story they should have written in 2004 about young voter turnout.

But in the 2004 presidential election, when the overall electorate showed a four-percentage-point increase in turnout from 2000, the turnout rate among people ages 18 to 24 increased by 11 points -- to 47 percent from 36 percent.

The spike was attributed, in part, to intense voter turnout efforts and a highly polarized election. But people who study this generation -- known as Generation Y, millennials and even DotNets -- say it is also disposed to be more politically active and passionate.

The way the article reads, it also looks like the parties are recognizing that their future lies less in talking to 60 year olds in Florida than in building in-roads with young voters and building a base that can last for a generation or more.

It's good to see this story now, but would have been even better 2 years ago when this actually happened. A lot of organizations that did good work getting out young voters might have been better able to fundraise, and our infrastructure would have been a lot stronger for it. As it is, lots of folks got cold feet. And lets not forget the obvious - we wouldn't have had to sit through two years of know-nothing pundits, consultants, and politicians making baseless claims about the apathy of young voters.

Either way, this is good to see. Maybe we'll actually see some decent coverage about young voters this election cycle.