Luke Russert Knows His Stuff

Jessica Hillyard from pushback has a nice post up about Luke Russert that I wanted to echo.

Some people have discounted Luke Russert, speculating that his father’s unfortunate early death led some NBC higher-ups to offer him a job as a correspondent out of pity. Even though it’s easy to jump to such a conclusion upon seeing a privileged rookie ascend the career ladder so quickly, Russert has a particularly keen insight into our generation. In an interview with mediabistro.com, he demonstrates that he certainly has done his homework:

It seems that every election storyline is always, “young people will be coming out in record numbers,” and it never seems to happen. Do you think this year will be any different?

I do. From what I’ve seen on the ground, it certainly looks like kids will turn up in bigger numbers this year. But if you just look at the trajectory of the numbers, if we go from 2000 to 2004, there was a nine point increase in the number of kids who came out to vote. [For] the midterm elections in 2002 to 2006, there was a substantial increase as well, I believe in the range of eight to 10 points. At the primaries, 6.6 million young folks turned out to participate. So, given all of those statistics and those numbers, on paper it certainly looks like the youth vote will come this election.

That being said, no one really knows for sure. There [are] massive new voter registration numbers. If you look at the state of Virginia, there’s been since January, I think, about four or five hundred thousand people who have been registered to vote. Of those hundreds of thousands, people under 34 make up 62 percent of that new number. So if those folks come out to vote in a place like Virginia, it could really sway things. And I think they will. I mean, if they don’t come out in this election, I don’t know when they ever will come.

On one hand I agree with Jessica -- it's impressive and refreshing to me that Luke is right on with this topic, acting as an advocate for our movement in the traditional media and dispelling some of the lazy journalism that fails to recognize a pattern that has emerged in three straight election cycles now. A few weeks back, Russert appeared on Morning Joe with Daily Show writer Larry Wilmore. When asked if he thought youth would turn out in 2008, Wilmore said "absolutely not," and he and Willie Geist, the interviewer, yukked it up, totally ignorant about their ignorance. And then Russert stepped in and slowly explained what we already know. Watch for yourself (sorry about the beep at the beginning -- I looked for another video of the same clip but couldn't find it):

At 1:10, Russert disagrees, as he explains the trajectory, rattling off the numbers that show improvement from 2002 to 2006 and the improvement in turnout from 2000 to 2004. Unfortunately Geist and Wilmore laugh it off, and Geist still shows he has no clue what he's talking about, equating the whole youth vote with "urban hipsters" wearing Obama paraphernalia, saying he doesn't think they'll get out of bed to vote.

Unfortunately this statement is why I might add one caveat onto Jessica's analysis. While Russert gets the job done and knows everything he needs to know, blowhards like Geist don't take him seriously enough because he's not someone they can suck up to. He's still "young," and therefore no matter how many facts he offers, Geist (and others) will never feel motivated enough by someone like Russert to actually do some journalism and check out the numbers for himself.