Early Polling on Youth Vote 2008

Update: Because so many people (on MyDD and Kos) have commented, yes, I know that the PEW poll results add up to more than 100%. The poll allowed respondents to choose multiple candidates, making it less a zero-sum contest than a measurement of potential support.
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Young Voter Strategies has compiled some early polls gauging youth support for both the Democratic and Republican contenders for President in 2008. It's still way too early for us to be looking at this as anything more than a snapshot of a still relatively uninformed electorate. But it's interesting none the less in that these polls confound - and confirm - some expectations.

(click to enlarge)

Notables:

• Obama has youth support (no surprise). Two polls show that by 11 points young democratic voters are more likely to support him than the general democratic electorate.
• Despite the runaway buzz about Obama's FaceBook army, Barack is tied with Hillary for support among young voters - 52% or 29% depending on which poll you choose (I'm excluding the RT Strategies poll because it defines "young" as 18-34, well beyond the leading edge of what is considered "Millennial").
• Because it bears repeating, Hillary is tied with Barack?!?!?!
• Edwards seems to be the biggest loser in these polls. Its tough to make comparisons, since the polls vary in how they define "young" and the selection of candidates they offer to respondents, but in no poll does Edwards get more than half the support that Hillary does, and it's almost as bad when you compare him to Barack. And then there is the YVS poll - 6% is crazy low for support among young voters.

I'm guessing that the Obama/Hillary deadheat is most likely due to Clinton's name recognition rather than an indicator of actual support. It's possible that she's running away with young women voters, but this early in the game, all voters are low-information voters, and I think name recognition is probably bootstrapping Clinton into a competitive position.

As an aside, I would like to use these numbers as an excuse to force us all to take a long hard look at using MySpace or FaceBook friends as an indicator of candidate support among the youth vote. Not only are those numbers not tracking with polling, but, as I've argued before, the number of "friends" a candidate currently boasts has little to do with turnout at a caucus or ballot box in 2008. We still need better metrics than "friends" to evaluate the efficacy of social networking as a campaign tool.

As for Edwards, I can think of a lot of reasons for his poor showing - the YVS Poll could be flawed (though that doesn't account for the Pew and RT polls), OneCorp's lackluster online toolset could be turning off young voters, or Obama/Clinton's media domination could be burying him. No matter how you slice it, it's bad. A worst case scenario for the Edwards team would be that OneCorp's service model of campaign organizing isn't connecting with the young voters who would seem to be a natural fit for the Senator's strategy.

Read the full YVS release here (pdf), which includes some head to head match-ups among Democrats and Republicans. (Warning, these match-ups are fun, but have a ginormous margin of error, which is why I'm not blogging them).