About the Youth Vote: A reader sees high turnout for Obama

By Ken Silverstein

A letter in response to yesterday’s post, which cited GOP consultant Tom Edmonds arguing that youth turnout for the presidential election would be smaller than expected.

Your 10/20 post entitled “Is it Over?,” mentioned that Edmonds thinks the youth won’t show up. In your article Edmonds says, “The largest youth turnout in the primaries was in Utah, where 16 percent of eligible young voters turned out—and they weren’t voting for Obama, they were voting for Mitt Romney.” The consultant appears to be conflating youth turnout with share. See Table 1 of this fact sheet for a state-by-state list of youth turnout and share.

In fact, Ohio and Wisconsin, not Utah, tied for the highest youth turnout (under 30s) in the primary/caucus season–25 percent. The share of young voters in Utah’s primary was 16 percent, but share and turnout are very different types of statistics. The denominator is important here. To calculate the share of a demographic, the denominator is the total number of votes cast, while the eligible population is the denominator used to calculate turnout. Thus, the share is affected by how other demographics vote, while the turnout is specific to the demographic in question.

Also, over 5 million young people voted in the Democratic primaries compared to only 1.7 million in Republican primaries. Obama won 60 percent of youth votes in the Democratic primary. McCain won only 34 percent of the youth vote in Republican primaries, and he was on the ballot in every single race.

Whether or not the youth vote will show up is unpredictable, but high registration numbers and websites that make the electoral process easier (i.e. govoteabsentee.org) are some promising signs.

Kind regards,

Karlo Marcelo

Research Associate, CIRCLE

www.civicyouth.org