exit polling

CIRCLE has released new data on the racial, gender, and educational makeup of the 2008 youth vote. Here's a quick look at the findings:

Education gaps in turnout reported during the primaries persisted in the general election, with non-college young voters turning out at much lower rates than did their college-educated (or attending) counterparts. In the primaries, NPR reported that only 1 in 14 non-college youth voted compared to 1 in 4 college youth. CIRCLE didn't crunch that particular statistic this time, but the numbers for non-college youth are still grim, as they vastly underperformed their share of the electorate.

The takeaway here should be that, evidence to the contrary, Obama didn't have the youth vote all wrapped up - he had the college educated youth vote wrapped up. Structural barriers to participation, lack of civics education, and a lack of outreach on the part of campaigns are still keeping a significant number of Millennials away from the polls.

Regardless of their rates of participation, support for Obama was constant among Millennials of all educational backgrounds. This was a significant change from the primaries, where less educated Millennials tended to throw their support behind Hillary Clinton.

Claims of a post-racial American proved to be untrue. Even among young voters race was a significant factor in determining one's vote, and young voters admitted as much:

Young people were more likely than older people to say that candidates' race was a factor (24% versus 19% of all voters).

It should be noted, however, that Obama made extraordinary gains among young white voters compared to previous Democratic candidates, and young white voters were much more likely to vote for him than were older white voters. This was also true among young Latino voters:

Obama ran the table with young voters who were also "new voters:"

As would be expected, many young voters were first-time voters: 64% of 18-24 year-olds and 43% of 18-29 year-olds were first time voters. This compares to just 11% of all voters.

Young voters were relatively late to make up their minds: only 50% of young voters said they had made up their minds before September compared to 60% of the entire electorate.

It was speculated before the election, that this campaign would to mobilize a large number of African-American and Latino voters. Forty-five percent of 18-29 years-old African-American voters and 61% of 18-to-29 year-old Latino voters cast their ballots for the first time, compared to 37% of young white voters.

Finally, CIRCLE identifies young woman as the unsung heroes of Obama's margin among Millennials:

Young women cast 55% of the votes for the 18 to 29 age group, which was consistent with the overall trend (53% of all votes were cast by women). However, this pattern was especially strong for young African American voters, 61% of whom were women. One exception to this pattern was seen among the young voters without high school diploma. Within this group, men cast more (57%) of the votes than women (43%). This gender balance reflects the proportion in the general population for this particular group (55% males, 45% females).

And here it is - our first major, negative youth vote story of the post election period, courtesy of MNSBC: Young Voters Not Essential To Obama Triumph. Now, I don't want to argue that young voters were the most important voting block of all voting blocks, or anything else so grand. The electorate can be sliced and diced in so many ways to make it appear as if one group or another cast the deciding ballots. But the way MSNBC writer Tom Curry goes about proving this valid point does a disservice to the facts and downplays the important role that young voters did play

But wait a minute — would Obama have won anyway without, for instance, younger voters?

AnaMaria Arumi, who directs the exit poll desk for NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo, has done the calculations based on the exit poll data and here is what she found: On a state-by-state level, when she re-ran the numbers as if there were no voters under 30, the only states that would switch to Republican presidential candidate John McCain are Indiana and North Carolina.

Without younger voters, Obama would still have won the 270 electoral votes he needs to become the next president.

To summarize - in fantasy land where young voters didn't exist, Obama still won the election. Here's the problem - we don't live in fantasy land, and removing young voters from the electorate doesn't accurately measure the impact of the record gains that Obama made in moving young voters' partisan loyalty. In order to measure that impact, you'd have to compare Obama's margins among young voters on Tuesday to the potential outcome had the youth vote divided their votes at along the same lines that they did in previous presidential contests, when the youth vote was traditionally more evenly divided.

Earlier this week, James Carville did just that and here's what he had to say:

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.

And let's not forget the most important fact of all. Polling and voting do not happen in a vacuum. As a colleague noted to me in an email exchange about Curry's piece:

The polling and voting cannot be separated from the efforts that caused them.

Are young voters the only voting block that made the difference for Sen. Obama? No, but they were an unquestionably important piece of the puzzle both in the voting booth and out in the field. More than that, they are the largest living generation in America and their loyalties shifted starkly to the left thanks to Sen. Obama. As long as we continue to engage them, that will have positive ramifications for Democrats up and down the ballot in many elections to come.