MSNBC: Chuck Todd and Lee Brenner Confuse "Young" Voters with "New and Lapsed" Voters

Last week I noted that the Wall Street Journal, NBC and MySpace released a joint poll in which they attempted to gauge the views of "new" and "lapsed" voters, who were defined as voters who had participated in the past, but skipped the 2004 election. At the time, I warned that there was a danger in making the mistake of equating these voters and the poll's results with the opinions of young voters.

Well, I just saw an MSNBC interview between Chuck Todd and Lee Brenner of MySpace in which both Todd and Brenner make this mistake multiple times during the segment. Brenner even goes so far as to suggest that the results of the poll accurately reflect the views of "students," a distinction made no where in the poll's methodology.

As I noted in my previous blog post, 45% of the survey respondents were over the age of 30. 39% of the sample was over 35 years of age. In my world, those don't count as young voters. The vast majority of the statistics discussed by Brenner and Todd make no distinction between those older and younger respondents in the poll, or between "new" and "lapsed" voters, who surely have different levels of interest and engagement. These respondents - and the results of this poll - shouldn't be equated with all young voters.

The WSJ/NBC/MySpace poll offered some unique information on new and lapsed voters. But that information can't be examined in a vacuum and it shouldn't be used to infer things about young voters generally. For a complimentary, and I think more accurate, look at what young voters are thinking this election cycle, I recommend the recent non-partisan poll released by Rock the Vote, Lake Research, and The Tarrance Group.