The Pundits are On Board

Reading all the youth vote press in the last week, one thing is abundantly clear - the punditry is now fully on board the youth vote wagon. When James Carville goes from saying this:

Show me a candidate who depends on the youth vote and I'll show you a loser.

To this:

Exit polling indicates that Mr Obama won two-thirds of those voting under 30 years old against 32 per cent for John McCain. Compare that with a 54-45 margin for John Kerry in 2004 and a 48-46 margin for Al Gore in 2000. Consider this: if young people had voted for Democrats at about the same proportion of the overall electorate (52-46) as they had voted as recently as 2000 for Mr Gore and for many cycles prior, Mr Obama would not have won North Carolina or Indiana. Young voters also provided the margin of victory in key battleground states such as Florida, Virginia and Ohio. The youth vote expanded the map for Mr Obama; it put him over the top in states not won by Democrats in decades.

Something has clearly changed.

The latest in this steady stream of pundits now cheer-leading the youth vote comes from this interview in Rolling Stone between Jann Wenner, David Gergen and Peter Hart:

Let's talk about a couple of those constituencies. The youth vote — what role did it play? Was it big enough to really make a difference?
HART: It made a huge difference. Remember: When we talk about the youth vote, we're talking about all 50 states. It's not like the evangelical vote or an ethnic group that is located in one particular area. Youth voters — coast to coast, border to border — turned to Obama in numbers that are just hard to fathom. They were drawn to him from day one, and it was a connection that was as psychological as it was issue-driven. This is somebody who spoke their language, who understood the times and who provided a direction that they wanted to see the country go in. Gore carried young voters by two points. Kerry carried them by about nine points. Obama carried them by 34 points.

GERGEN: The emergence of this millennial generation as a force in American politics is going to be one of the biggest stories in the country over the next 20 years or so. We know from past history that when young people vote for one party a couple of times, they tend to vote for that party during their adult lifetimes in disproportionate numbers. We last saw this with Ronald Reagan, who attracted an unusual number of young people. But the rising generation of millennials is bigger than what has come before. They are even bigger than the baby-boom population, and they are much more progressive and diverse. Forty percent of millennials are minorities. They look past gender and race in ways that baby boomers do not. They embrace diversity, whereas older Americans tend to be wary or even scared of it. So this is an enormous potential asset for Democrats. We talked all along about whether Barack being black would drive away voters. Among the millennials, the fact that he was black attracted voters.

The whole interview is quite good. Gergen and Hart know their stuff and give a good overview of the youth vote, technology, and Obama's new winning coalition. But these quotes in particular could have been ripped right from the partisan youth vote coalition's talking points. A year ago, it's hard to imagine that the post-election youth vote narrative would be so favorable. You really can't complain. Except I'm me, so I will complain.

The one thing that's missing in this picture is us - the young people. It's great that the punditocracy is on board and preaching the youth vote, but there are precious few of us on TV or in some of these big stories talking about the youth vote and how we got from 2000's near tie among youth to last week's landslide. If I had my druthers, we'd be out there more telling our story rather than the pundits, many of whom probably doubted the youth vote right up until the polls closed.