Pew Youth Vote Report: Huge Partisan/Outreach Gaps Between Obama and McCain

Pew Research has a new report: Young Voters in the 2008 Election. The details of the report read like they were ripped right from the blog posts here at Future Majority - I could get used to that.

If you are interested in demographic data on the 2008 youth vote, there's lots of good stuff in the report, including breakouts by income, education, race, religiosity, gender and party ID. The long and short being that, among 18 - 29 year olds, Obama won all racial, gender, and socioeconomic demographics, including white non-college males. The only group that he lost, according to the data, is self-identified young Republicans.

Beyond demographics, there were two findings in the research that I thought were noteworthy in that I hadn't seen them reported anywhere else. The first was this breakdown of the Democratic youth vote margin compared to the overall Democratic vote over the past three decades. We've touched on that data here (see the graphs on the sidebar), though we've never compared them side by side in this format. It really highlights how significant and unusual young voter's support for Obama is historically:

The second item I wanted to highlight, and to my mind the most interesting/new item in the data, is the vast difference in contact rates by the campaigns.

Nationally, 25% of young voters reported being contacted at some point by the Obama campaign, compared to just 13% for John McCain. In crucial swing states, that gap climbed as high as 35%. Back in 2007 and early 2008, I was worried that "maverick" John McCain, ubiquitous guest on the Daily Show, spotted in such movies as Wedding Crashers; a candidate who did quite well in his appearance at the MTV/MySpace Dialogue, would make a play for the youth vote. Maybe it was a function of the youth energy surrounding Obama's campaign by the time McCain emerged from the primaries. Maybe it was a function of McCain's smaller campaign budget and lack of a coherent field operation. But it looks like the Maverick completely ceded the playing field to Sen. Obama when it came to young voters. He didn't even try.

Looking at the contact rates for older cohorts, it looks like McCain had his hands full just trying to compete with Obama among his base - voters over 65 who were the only age demographic to choose him over Sen. Obama.

Pew notes that this disparity in contact rate accounted for a significant difference at the polls, and hits upon one of our favorite talking points here at Future Majority (emphasis mine):

But the electoral influence of young voters also depends on efforts made to mobilize them. According to the exit polls, young voters in key battleground states this year were far more likely to have been contacted by the Obama campaign than by the McCain campaign - and in some states they were more likely than older voters to have been contacted, a significant reversal from past patterns.

Nationally, a quarter of voters (25%) 18-29 say someone contacted them in person or by phone on behalf of the Obama campaign about coming out to vote. By contrast, just 13% were contacted by the McCain campaign. In 2004, nearly the same share of young voters was reached by the Kerry campaign (22%) as was reached by the Bush campaign (19%).

But the disparity was much larger in some of the key battleground states. In Pennsylvania and Nevada, which Obama carried by double-digit margins, more than half of voters under age 30 said they were contacted by the Obama campaign (54% in Pennsylvania and 61% in Nevada). The McCain campaign reached considerably fewer young voters in those states -- 30% in Pennsylvania and 26% in Nevada. Obama's get-out-the-vote operation also reached three times as many young voters as McCain's operation in Indiana (45% vs. 15%) and twice as many in Florida (32% vs. 16%).

The curious thing about the data is that, despite incredibly high contact rates for young voters, major swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida actually saw a significant decline in share among young voters. In those three states - almost the holy trinity of Presidential Politics, youth share of the electorate dropped 4%, 4%, and 3% respectively over 2004 levels.

The most obvious reason I can think of behind this dramatic underperformance is disinterest and disillusionment among young McCain supporters. Lacking any significant contact or encouragement from their candidate - who spent his final weeks on the trail shoring up Red States - perhaps they turned out in far lower numbers than in the more closely contested 2004 race. If those young conservatives sat it out on election day, and older voters turned out in greater numbers than usual, that might account for the rather dramatic decrease in youth share in those states.

Whatever the cause - and I'm sure it is something we'll be returning to again and again in the coming months as more data creeps out - this is great information from PEW proving once again that outreach to young voters works. Not only can it move votes, it can win elections.