Young Downscale Voters Didn't Show Up At Polls in 2008 Elections
Corrected on 03/20/09: An earlier version of this article misstated an estimate of the under-30 voting population. They made up 18 percent of the electorate.
By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
An update to my blog post yesterday on young voters: I've just checked out some Census numbers which I should have consulted before finishing that post. From the Census estimates of population by age in 2007, I find that of the 227,719,424 people 18 and over, 50,550,121 were 18 to 29. In other words, the under 30 population was 22 percent of the total adult population. So the young made up 22 percent of the potential electorate (or maybe one percent or two percent less, since they're probably less likely to be citizens and more likely to be imprisoned felons than their elders) but were only, according to the exit poll, 18 percent of the actual electorate. Which suggests very strongly that the young vote in 2008 was tilted heavily upscale, in terms of income and especially education, compared to the overall population. This reinforces my sense that the downscale young didn't show up and vote very much at all. So it remains, to me at least, a mystery how they would have voted if they did. I need to do more thinking and research on this.
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Tags: voters | census | election history | young voters
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Reader Comments
Not the strongest demographic for Republicans
I'm sure those young downscale voters would have went out in droves for McCain if they had only been aware of his plans to not raise the top marginal tax rate and his plans to lower capital gains and estate taxes. If only they knew.
OK. So Republicans are going to have trouble with young downscale voters, but what about young upscale voters? Tax cuts are attractive, but the social conservative crowd will scare many of these folks away. Many wealthy people here in the Northeast would vote Republican for financial reasons, but are repelled by the creationists and homophobes. Republicans will do better in the future if they focus on reckless spending by the Dems and completely ignore the "culture war" issues. Or better yet, if they can evolve and accept science and gay folks.
Go ahead and research
But please don't purport to "find" that those young folks who did not show up would have somehow chosen McCain if only they could have gotten there.
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