Hispanic voters

A few quick links on some items I just became aware of, most pertaining to categories of "young voters" we don't necessarily always think about:

The Pew Hispanic Center has a fact sheet (pdf) with some notable information about the hispanic youth vote:

The Hispanic population on the whole is younger than the rest of the U.S. population. Among Latinos, for example, 34% of the population is less than 18 years old compared to 23% of the non-Hispanic white population. Moreover, this segment of the Latino population is growing much faster than in the population overall. As a result, young, native-born Latinos are a disproportionately large source of growth in the youth electorate and they are by far the largest source of growth in the Latino electorate.

Every year since the 2000 elections an average of 425,000 native-born Latinos has turned 18 years old and become eligible to vote. While Latinos make up 8% of eligible voters, they represent 12% of the electorate that is between 18 and 24 years old. Given their fast rate of growth, Latinos will account for 68% of the increase in this segment of the electorate between the 2000 and 2004 elections.

There's even more good information in the fact sheet about this fast-growing portion of the youth electorate that we're still not doing enough to reach.

Noting that the average age of new mothers in America is 25, Tamara Drout has some interesting thoughts about the paradoxes of our health policy, the challenges young parents face, and opportunities for changing our health system:

The average age a woman in this country has her first child is 25; and two out of three children younger than five are raised by parents younger than 34. While deep-seated ideological obstacles to making America more family-friendly remain, there's a new generation of parents who bear little resemblance to their baby boomer predecessors, and they should be brought into the conversation.

Finally, Minnesota and and Maryland are trying to make it easier for young people to register to vote.