The Youth Vote According to MySpace

This week, MySpace officially launched MyDebates, their destination site for the Presidential debates. I've written before about how these look to be a regression to Web 1.0, and I won't rehash that here other than to say that, after perusing their new site, my opinion has not changed (and probably won't until we actually see these debates in action).

However, I did come across one item on the MyDebates that's at least worth toying around with. Like myriad other websites, one of the function of MyDebates is a user quiz on the issues to help "undecideds" determine how they should cast their ballot. MySpace is taking the extra, more interesting step of aggregating all of that issue and voting information, breaking it down by age and gender, and allowing users to display that data via a flash map. It's pretty cool.

Here's a look at how 18 - 34 year olds are going to vote, according to Myspace:

Here's a look at men within that age demographic:




Now the women:




It's tempting to draw conclusions from this - southern women are more conservative than southern men, women in Alaska dont' like Sarah Palin, etc. Of course, there are all kinds of problems with this, and the map tool is more like a neat demographic toy than a serious data set. We have no idea how many respondents there are (at this point, judging by the amount of "friends" MyDebates has, probably not many), and those respondents in the data set are both self-selecting and limited to MySpace users. As such, this isn't really representative of MySpace, let alone the whole country.

I imagine that once the debates get kicking, MySpace will have respondents numbering in the tens of thousands. It would be awesome if they could open source their data or team up with a pollster to draw out some reliable information about the youth electorate, or at least the overall MySpace community.