A Moment For Young Voters
Posted on April 29, 2008 by andrew
Pew has a chart you’ll likely be seeing a lot over the course of the next day or two:
That’s a twenty-five point gap in favor of the Democrats.
Mori Dinauer looks at the 2004 election results and does a rough calculation of how they might have changed if the youth party identification gap had been as large then as it is now. The results suggest that Obama or Clinton might have an extra million or so youth votes compared to what Kerry received four years ago, even without assuming any increased young voter turnout.
I think there’s something else worth considering so long as we’re making rough predictions based on these numbers, namely, the utter lack of appeal of this particular Republican candidate to the young voters already predisposed to lean Democrat. As I’ve said before and will continue repeating until November (at least), John McCain is really fucking old. Now, I’m not saying that young voters won’t ever vote for an older candidate, but I am saying that most people wouldn’t trust their grandfather’s hand on the proverbial button. John McCain is literally old enough to be the grandfather of someone aged 18-29.1 To put it a bit more tactfully, it’s going to be awfully hard for someone who remembers Pearl Harbor to convince me (when I can barely even remember the Challenger explosion) that he genuinely understands my problems and concerns.
I see another (slightly more nebulous) concern for John McCain in attracting the youth vote. As we all know, McCain’s base is the national press corps. As we all believe to be true, young voters are the least likely to look to traditional media as their primary source of information. Add those two factors together, and the demographic least disposed to identify as Republicans is also the demographic least disposed to pay any attention whatsoever to the pro-McCain cheerleading coming from his most devoted constituents. They are instead the most likely to learn from “new media” the truth about McCain’s extremely unpopular positions on almost every issue that matters to them.
I’m not some crazy youth vote idealist who expects this election to turn on an unprecedented wave of eighteen-year-olds. I’m merely saying that young voters can participate at exactly the same rates they have in the past, and McCain should still lose the demographic by several million votes.
- Hillary Clinton, twelve years McCain’s junior, is also technically old enough to be grandmother to someone in their very early twenties, but it’s a bit of a stretch; extremely few of us have grandparents in their sixties, but many of us, presumably, have grandparents still in their seventies. ↩
» Filed Under 2004 presidential election, 2008 presidential election, John McCain, party identification, polls, young voters
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