Democrats have talked about getting young voters out in force, but this year it actually happened — and they benefited:
Young Americans voted in the largest numbers in at least 20 years in congressional elections, energized by the Iraq war and giving a boost to Democrats, pollsters said on Wednesday.
About 24 percent of Americans under the age of 30, or at least 10 million young voters, cast ballots in Tuesday’s elections that saw Democrats make big gains in Congress. That was up 4 percentage points from the last mid-term elections in 2002.
“This looks like the highest in 20 years,” said Mark Lopez, research director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which compiled the data based on exit polls. “Unfortunately, we can’t say if it’s a record because don’t have good comparable data before 1986.”
Rock the Vote, a youth-and-civics group, said young voters favored Democrats by a 22-point margin, nearly three times the margin Democrats earned among other age groups and dealing a potentially decisive blow to Republicans in tight races.
“The turnout was awesome,” said 21-year-old Katryn Fraher, a political science major at the University of New Mexico who helped build a giant map of local polling stations for her school and was among a group of students walking the campus on Tuesday with a blackboard that counted down the time to vote.
But despite the big turnout, it may not be a record.
In the 1982 mid-term election during the Reagan administration, youth turnout reached 27 percent, but that was among voters aged between 18 to 24 instead of under 30 as measured by Wednesday’s exit poll estimates.
Republican pollster Ed Goeas said young voters could have swayed a number of tight races on Tuesday, noting that of 28 seats Democrats picked up from Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, 22 were won by less than 2 percent of the vote and 18 were won by just 5,000 votes or less.
The challenge for the Democrats is solidifying this support from newer, younger voters. And the challenge for the Republicans will be winning them over. In talking with lots of young people during my extensive travels (for instance, this post is being written from Rapid City, South Dakota) I have picked up a lot of anti-Bush feeling over the past year — the film “Jesus Camp” to the contrary. I’ve also seen several examples of a generational split where fervent Bush supporters have kids who are not fond of GWB.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.