exit polls

Bumped. Thanks to Project Vote for two great and relevant diaries while I'm away for the holiday. --Mike

The United States saw dramatic increases in voting from traditionally underrepresented groups, including minorities and young voters, according to a new analysis released this week by Project Vote. If borne out by systematic analysis of the voter rolls, this change in the electorate is evidence of the power of successful voter registration drives and an indication of the strong inclination of voters to participate in the process when candidates address their issues.

Countering the conventional wisdom that the voting population on November 4 did not change as dramatically as predicted, the analysis, The Demographics of Voters in America’s 2008 General Election: A Preliminary Assessment, demonstrates that African-Americans, Latinos, and young voters cast millions more ballots in 2008 than in 2004.

“The analysis estimated that about 5.8 million more minorities voted in this year's presidential election than in 2004, while nearly 1.2 million fewer whites went to the polls,” wrote Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers. “The figures appear to reflect the success of Project Vote and other liberal voter registration groups in registering millions of young, poor, elderly and minority Americans to vote in recent election cycles.”

According to the analysis, African-Americans cast nearly three million more ballots nationwide in 2008 than in 2004—an increase of 21 percent. The total votes cast by Latinos went up by 16 percent—more than 1.5 million—and young Americans aged 18-29 cast 1.8 million more votes, a nine percent increase. That the overall totals did not increase significantly compared to 2004 was in part due to a decrease in voting by white voters.

In addition to presenting an analysis of ballots cast from the United States as a whole, the memo by Project Vote consultant and Ph.D. candidate Jody Herman and Barnard College political science professor Lorraine Minnite examines several key states in detail, including Colorado, Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The Project Vote data is preliminary, and does not speak to “turnout,” which is traditionally a measure of the percentage of the voting-eligible population that shows up to vote. Project Vote expects to release a full report on turnout in the 2008 election in 2009 when government survey data on the voting-eligible population comes available. Yet, this preliminary analysis indicates that a significant shift occurred this year.

“There is no doubt that this surge in voting by Americans of color and young people had a powerful impact on the outcome of the election,” said Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote, in a press release issued today.

“Separate opinion polls and election results themselves indicate that an overwhelming majority of African-Americans and Latinos backed Obama,” according to Gordon.

“Thus, the appearance of an African-American presidential candidate with a sympathetic message may have prompted the nation's minorities to vote at levels approaching white voters -- if final state vote counts do not upend Project Vote's figures,” wrote AlterNet's Steve Rosenfeld last week. “Its findings also suggest the U.S. electorate is not an inflexible assembly of voting constituencies, but has segments that are mobilized -- or demobilized -- depending on the year, candidate and message,”

In an email exchange with Rosenfeld, Frank Sharry, executive director of pro-immigration reform group, America's Voice, said “neither the turnout increase among Latinos -- nor the swing in support to Democrats -- were surprising.”

“Telling people you don't like them and don't want them is not a winning electoral strategy,” wrote Sharry. “But that is what the Republican Party has been saying to immigrants, Latino immigrants in particular, for the past four years. No surprise, then, that record numbers of Latinos turned out in 2008 and that the swing away from Republicans to Democrats among Latino immigrants in particular was dramatic.”

As you saw on the 2008 Youth Vote Map, Colorado is one of the states for which we have no exit poll data on young voters. Early in the evening on election night, CNN reported exit poll data showing Obama losing the Colorado youth vote 47 - 53%. Based on that data, the NY Post wrote:

Colorado was the only state that Obama flipped from Bush's 2004 result without winning the youth vote - he lost 47-53 among that age group there, perhaps due to the large military presence in that state.

The story was also picked up by Politicker.

Unfortunately (or, fortunately), the story turned out to be false. Something was dramatically wrong with the exit polling data, and before the night was through CNN replaced the 47 - 53% youth figures with "N/A." As of this writing, the exit poll still shows "N/A" for its 18 - 29 data.

No one seems to know what went wrong (though I've got a few inquiries out at the moment), however the folks at New Era Colorado were able to get a local pollster to go on record about state polls leading up to election day. Here's what they had to say about the Colorado youth vote:

RBI conducted a number of statewide surveys among likely voters over the course of the 2008 election season and Obama was never behind in the Colorado youth vote. In fact, RBI's last statewide survey just days before the election showed Obama receiving over 60% of the 18-34 vote.

Yes, RBI's numbers are for 18 - 34, not 18 - 29, but it seems unlikely that the numbers would be substantially off considering that the Gen Xers in the 30 - 34 category tended to be more conservative, rather than more liberal. Any bias they introduced into the data would likely swing in McCain's favor, not Obama's.

It always seemed fishy that Colorado youth would swing towards McCain. The state is trending blue for a while now, it's got a great progressive infrastructure, and a growing Hispanic population - all recipes for Democratic support. It's good to know that is likely still the case. I'll post more if I get a good explanation for why the exit polling was so flawed.

CIRCLE just released an update on youth turnout. They are estimating that youth turnout in 2008 increased by at least 2.2 million votes over 2004. Not all precincts are reporting, and there is still a lot of absentee and early votes to count, so it's highly possible that we will see that number rise.

Unfortunately, they are still not able to provide, with any certainty, hard numbers on the youth turnout percentage. They can, however predict that it will increase, and that increase will lie within a range of 1 to 6 percentage points. That would put youth turnout yesterday somewhere between 49.3 and 54.5%. To put that into historical perspective (pdf), the low end will represent the third highest youth turnout ever recorded, following only 1992 and 1972. The high end - 54.5% - will represent the second highest youth turnout ever, lagging only behind 1972, the year that 18, 19 and 20 year-olds were first granted the right to vote.

Preliminary CIRCLE projections show the turnout for young Americans (ages 18-29) is higher than in 2004, a year of significant increase, and is much higher than it was in 2000 and 1996. [...]

An estimated 21.6 million-23.9 million young Americans voted in Tuesday’s presidential election, an increase of at least 2.2 million compared with 2004, according to national exit polls, demographic data, and projections of total numbers of votes cast. CIRCLE projects the youth voter turnout will be between 49.3% and 54.5%, an increase of 1 to 6 percentage points over CIRCLE’s estimate based on the 2004 exit polls. The 2004 election was a strong one for youth turnout, reversing a long history of decline. [...] Depending on the final vote tally, this year’s youth turnout could be the second highest since 1972 (55.4%).

For those who think those numbers are small, I'd remind you that expectations were unrealistically high, and these numbers are very much in line with what I was thinking last week. It's also worth noting that 2004 was a year where we saw a huge increase in youth turnout, and to build on top of that is in itself a big achievement.

But almost 24 hours since the first polls closed, the major story about the youth vote is not the turnout numbers, but the record-breaking margins by which young voters selected Senator Obama over his opponent. Sixty six percent of young voters picked Senator Obama, vs. just 32% for John McCain. That 34 point margin is the largest ever recorded since exit polls first began tracking such data in 1976. It's also on the higher end of all the polling data we saw prior to the election

Not only were young voters highly unified behind the Democratic candidate, they were much more likely to vote Democratic than the electorate as a whole, and the degree to which the youth vote differed from the popular vote was greater yesterday than at any time in the past 30 years.

This is the manifestation of the progressive future majority, predicted by NDN and a handful of books, that today's young voters will bring to fruition: a massive demographic shift to the left brought about by the largest, most progressive generation in American history.

I know that everyone is turning their eyes towards policy - passing progressive energy and health care legislation, and ending the war. That's why we fought for so many years to elect more and better Democrats. But let me make the case for why we cannot let up and take young voters for granted; why this needs to be just the beginning of a longterm shift in terms of how the Democratic Party does business.

Less than half of the Millennial generation were eligible to vote yesterday, and all Millennials will not be in the electorate until 2016. We know that partisanship is a loyalty that develops early in life (pdf), usually during the first three major elections in which one participates. What the Obama campaign, and many others, did yesterday was lock in the loyalty of those who first participated in 2004. That's only a small fraction of the Millennials, and we have a long way to go still. I've written about this effect before, calling it the first of many thirds - the idea that engaging youth is a rolling process in which we are always ushering a new generation towards that third election that locks in partisan loyalty.

Despite all he has accomplished, Obama's faith in young voters, and his extensive efforts to engage those voters, remains the exception, not the rule, among Democratic operatives, campaigns, and the state parties. Back in 2004, a survey of state party leaders found that more considered engaging senior citizens to be vital to the long-term health of the party than did those who thought young voters were important to the future of the party. While I'm sure that the state parties have improved their record since 2004 - some more than others - young voters still remain an underfunded afterthought among party officials and cash-strapped campaigns.

That's the definition of short sighted, especially following an election where young voters actually outperformed the 65+ demographic. A simple look at the partisan youth numbers during the 80s can show us the foolishness of such shortsighted thinking.

In the 80s, Ronald Reagan appealed to young voters, commanding their loyalty by impressive margins, in part through a reinvigorated, and well-funded, College Republican organization. Those voters remained some of the most conservative in the electorate. But the Republican Party failed to continue their outreach to young voters and by 1992, the youth vote was split between the three candidates - Clinton, Bush and Perot. Today, the College Republicans are basically an irrelevant direct marketing scam whose rising stars are a national embarrassment. Senator McCain never had a youth operation beyond the blog written by his own daughter, and he banked his campaign on an appeal to those supposedly reliable older voters. We've all seen how that worked out.

Should Obama's youth outreach remain the exception, not the rule, this same atrophy could befall the Democratic Party and erode its now record-breaking youth support. Certainly not now, and perhaps not while Obama remains in office, but eventually, and perhaps before the partisan loyalty of the Millennials become fixed.

So while we all continue to pour over the exit polls from last night, and while we all wait for more solid data on youth turnout, I'd like to plant this seed in the minds of progressive activists, democratic consultants and staffers with the DNC and state parties: don't let up. In fact, step it up. Keep working to engage young voters. Senator Obama showed the way: peer to peer contact, speak to their issues, don't cut them off your walk lists, and use the efficiencies afforded by new technology to engage them on their own terms.

Over the next few months we will be inundated with studies determining the effectiveness of a wide range of these new tactics - such as cellphone phone banking to text message reminders. Some of these tactics will scale down to the smallest race, others won't. But if we want to continue to build on the gains we've seen among young voters, we must work to integrate young voter outreach - in all its forms - into all of our campaigns, and all levels of the party.

Great post by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.

Ten reasons to wait until all the votes are counted before we start talking about the results with any degree of certainty.

• Campus Politico notes that there is a large drop-off of voting among young people in down-ballot races. Matt Stoller at Open Left lets us know that the Obama campaign is hoping to change that. He posts a copyof an Obama campaign email reminding him to vote down ballot.
• Pew Research provides a preview of how exit polling will be conducted on Tuesday, and how early voting and an influx of new voters will be factored into those polls. Good reading for those who will be looking at the numbers on E-Day.
• The website for The Youngest Candidate, an excellent film that follows four 18 year-olds as they run for public office, is now live. It's got some great design work done by Shepard Fairey
• Tim Fernholz at Tapped thinks that campgain widgets like the Obama tax calculator are the future of issue campaigning.
• The folks at Overdetermined, a new blog about data analysis, have some pre-election gallows humor:

• The whack jobs at Human Events detail the "pernicious effects" of voter registration drives on American civic life. Ooh scary.
• Obama's in-game X Box ads cost $44,000. Chump change when you raise $150m in one month.
• Mobilize.org spotlights a new report on college affordability.
• Here's a late entry - Al Gore's address to the Power Vote coalition. My gut says this was probably very motivating to the diehards in the coalition who are doing GOTV and signing people up to take the Power Vote pledge. I found it a little dry coming after Obama's program last night, but I was glad to see Gore speak positively about youth involvement rather than advocating for ineffective strategies from his youth:

Here's what I'm hearing:

Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE weighs in on number crunching youth turnout, and 2004's botched coverage of young voters:

We calculate youth turnout by starting with the national exit polls' estimate of the proportion of voters who were young, multiplying by state election officials' count of all the ballots counted as of Nov. 8, and dividing by the Census Bureau's estimate of the number of American residents who are young adults. The result is just an estimate, but that's all we can ever have when we look at turnout by demographic groups. Besides, in past years, this method has closely tracked the results of Census' November current population survey, which is the only alternative source.

Getting the news out was important in '04. As many readers of this blog know, the Associated Press misreported the turnout statistics last time. The AP reporter looked only at the percentage of voters who were young and concluded that youth turnout had fallen, when in fact it had surged by 11 points in a banner year for participation. I called her but she resisted my entreaties. DailyKos and other bloggers picked up the AP story as an explanation of Kerry's defeat. (Young people were supposed to turn out for Kerry; Kerry lost; ergo, young people must have stayed home. Which was bad logic, since Kerry's brightest news was his strong support from under-30s.)

Once the AP and the blogosphere had the wrong story, it built on itself. I watched a TV reporter ask a political scientist who shall remain nameless, "Why do you think the youth vote fizzled?" He replied with a long explanation about low trust in government, apathy, ignorance, blah, and blah. That story teaches a lesson about not accepting the factual premises of reporters' questions unless you know them to be true.

Remember, even Kos got it wrong in 2004. If you've got an account, go give this diary a recommend and pass it around.

Levine's also got some links to maps charting historical youth turnout state by state. They're worth checking out and bookmarking.