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February 08, 2008, 11:22 AM ET
Youth Vote Update
Today in the Chronicle is this update on how the youth vote (18-29-year-olds) voted in Super Tuesday primaries. The story, by Beckie Supiano, notes that turnout for them was high, sometime tripling in number, and the youth vote may even have swayed a few outcomes.
We have some of the standard paeans to the young, such as CIRCLE Director Peter Levine stating that young people are “becoming more interested in news and public affairs,” and the article noting “the importance to young voters of hot-button issues like the war in Iraq and the economy.” We have lots of evidence against those claims, such as this 2007 survey by Pew Research Center that found that only 15 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds have “high knowledge” of current affairs, while 35 percent of 30-49-olds and 47 percent of 50-64-year-olds did. And why anybody thinks that the young care more about the economy than the middle-aged and elderly do is a mystery.
Still, some of the gains are impressive.
New York was flat at 12 percent, and in California, we got an OK bump of 4 points, 13 percent to 17 percent. But Connecticut went from 7 to 12 percent, while Georgia tripled — 7 to 21 percent — as did Oklahoma (4 to 14 percent) and Missouri (7 to 21), while Tennessee leaped from 3 to 15 percent.
Of course, the young are still well behind the average for every other age group. In California, for instance, the rate for 30-and-up nearly doubled the youth rate, 32 percent to 17. In Alabama it was 36 to 19; Illinois 37 to 18; New York 20 to 12; Tennessee 29 to 15.
See the CIRCLE report by going here, then clicking on the first bullet for a pdf, “National results.”
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