Record turnout of youth vote!

You won’t see this headline a lot, though it’s true. The truth is that the youth vote definately came out and it came out for John Kerry. 4.6 MILLION new youth voters showed up at the polls. These voters polled overwhelmingly for Democrats. A lot of commentators have been citing the “fact” that young voters maintained the same percentage of the total vote (17-18%) as proof that the “youth registered but failed to go to the polls”. (I think a lot of them are confusing this number with the turnout percentage.) This discounts the fact that turnout increased to record or near record levels in every other group, too. To say that the youth vote “didn’t come out” says that no one else did, either. A completely absurd assertion! In every other group, both Ds and Rs (if the turnout is real) came out in huge numbers. Among youth the turnout was fueled overwhelmingly by the Kerry vote. Don’t let the corporate conventional media disenfranchise you. The Kerry youth vote came out big time. It was the Republican youth vote that sat this one out.

Salon.com News | Big voter turnout seen among young people (Watch an ad to see the whole story, then check out the rest of Salon.)

Under-30 voters came through in big numbers this year, with more than 20 million casting a ballot for president, researchers found. The turnout bested their 2000 showing by more than nine percentage points and heartened activists who worked to get young voters to the polls.
…
Researchers at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at the University of Maryland found that 18- to 29-year-old turnout was up by 4.6 million voters from exit poll data from the 2000 election.

They based their calculations on exit polls done for The Associated Press and others by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.

The figures also beat exit poll numbers from 1992, the last time the youth vote spiked amid an otherwise general decline in turnout since 18-year-olds first got the chance to vote in 1972.

Turnout increased among other age groups, too, leaving young voters with roughly the same proportion of the total electorate nationally as in 2000. But activists who were part of an unprecedented effort to get out the vote — from Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself to the Youth Vote Coalition — felt that didn’t detract from their accomplishment.

Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture has posted a bunch of useful and heartening maps. Check these out to give yourself a better perspective on the election results than the TV maps with a vast expanse of desert colored red. Here’s how the election would have gone if only the under 30 vote had shown up.
Here’s another more realistic map page that gives a clearer and less stark view of the results. The country is not as divided as the “conventional” narrative would have it.
More data: (I will continue to post here as I find sources of data.)
Rachel on AirAmerica Radio reports that in battleground states 64% of the youth vote turned out. This is up 13% from 2000 and above the 1992 Clinton vote that was the previous high for youth vote. This is despite a heavy registration campaign that set the bar higher than ever. (I do have questions about the accuracy of registration figures and hence turnout percentages.)
(From AirAmerica Radio “Keep Hope Alive” show) Rep. Jesse Jackson (fils) noted the record youth vote. Rev. Jesse Jackson (pere) says that the problem was that the Republicans ran a 50 State campaign while the Democrats fought a limited battleground state campaign, failing to support minority candidates in non-battleground states and failing to make their case to non-battleground voters as well as they did in states where they concentrated resources.

Salon’s Lisa Chamberlain weighs in with more facts (go ahead and watch the add):

Conventional wisdom has it that GOTV efforts by groups like Downtown for Democracy were for naught. An Associated Press story using exit poll data circulated shortly after the election reported that as a share of the electorate, the youth vote stayed at about 18 percent, the same as in 2000. Despite the predictions of record turnout among voters ages 18 through 29, observers said, they did not go to the polls in the expected numbers. Some bloggers even blamed them for John Kerry’s loss. As was the case throughout this long, excruciating election, the conventional wisdom turns out to be wrong.

According to a report by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), almost 5 million more young people voted in 2004 than in 2000, an increase of 9.3 percent. The reason the youth vote as a percentage of the electorate stayed the same is simple: More people in every demographic group voted in 2004. Looking at the youth vote merely as a percentage of the overall vote to gauge their effect on the election is misleading.

Although the final tally has yet to be fully dissected, 21st Century Democrats has dramatic numbers from Franklin County, Ohio, which includes Columbus, home to Ohio State University. In the precincts where the group focused most intently, the youth vote accounted for upward of 85 percent of the total vote, and Democratic turnout in those areas jumped by 128 percent. In the same precincts, the Republican turnout was up only 6 percent. “What it shows is that young voters contributed substantially to the increase in the Democratic vote. Lines at 6:30 a.m. were already an hour long, so students had to really stick with it to vote. The main voting place at Ohio State closed at 7:30. People were still voting at 9:30.”

Indeed, the youth vote is the only demographic bloc that went decisively for Kerry, both nationally and in swing states. According to exit polls, young people nationwide voted 54 percent for Kerry.

…
One hopes the new activists won’t be discouraged by early press reports suggesting their hard work to get peers to the polls was wasted. “There [have] been a lot of misinformed statements in the media,” says Hans Reimer, Washington director for Rock the Vote. “The story came out early that young people didn’t vote as expected, and people jumped on it. And that story was up for a long time when no election analysis was out yet, so it filled a vacuum. When we came along the next morning to correct it, the train had left the station. I never expected we would find ourselves spinning against the media after exceeding our goals.”

Rock the Vote’s goal this year was to get the youth vote back up to where it was in 1992, a high-water mark achieved by Bill Clinton, who played his saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall Show” and gamely answered the question “Boxers or briefs?” The total number of young voters this year didn’t just match the number in 1992, it was up by 4 percent over that election. Reimer is concerned that the media’s spin on what should have been touted as an unqualified success may lead to cynicism among the people his organization spent so much time and effort engaging in the electoral process. Reimer says Rock the Vote spent $5 million this year, expanding a database of 15,000 e-mail addresses to one with more than 700,000.

“They felt like they were excited and everywhere they looked people were voting, and then to have the media say they didn’t vote, they’ll feel like the whole thing was phony. But it was real. They said they were going to vote, and they did. And the skeptics are saying that they didn’t. And that’s a tragedy. It’s one thing to be cynical about the media. It’s another thing to be cynical about your peers.”

And the Washington Post also offers a correction.

This story (posted here from the (San Jose) Mecury News): Youth turnout on Election Day larger than rumored, by Kavita Kumar of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reiterates these points:

The truth is, by many measures, young people appeared to have rocked the vote as promised and showed up in large numbers – bigger even than in 1992, the last high mark for turnout among this group, according to widely cited and accepted estimates. It was the biggest turnout since 1972, when the voting age changed to 18 from 21, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at the University of Maryland.

“Turnout was awesome, to put it simply,” said Adam Alexander, a spokesman for the New Voters Project. “We were hoping to turn out 20 million. And we hit 21 million.”

The story adds some more info about where “hard information” may be available:

Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, said he does not trust any numbers circulating about youth turnout, especially since the exit polls nationwide proved to not be very reliable.

Still, he does believe that young people on college campuses substantially increased their turnout in battleground states, where they probably helped make those races closer than they otherwise would have been, he said.

The best information about youth turnout, many experts agree, will come out next year when the Census Bureau releases its population survey that includes voter and registration information.

Some reports from the trenches.
Some blogs that agree with me: Where Dolphins Play, Moose-blog

Yet Rev. Michael A. Schuler, my minister at FUS-Madison repeated the conventional wisdom in his post-election sermon last Sunday. Disappointing.