Gallup

Gallup's new presidential approval report, Obama Approval Continues to Show Party, Age, Race Gaps, indicates that young and minority voters are the strongest supporters of the President.

The poll shows why the Vote 2010 strategy for OFA/DNC that President Obama spoke about last month makes sense. Younger and minority voters are the most supportive, are traditionally underrepresented at the polls, and require outreach to boost turnout.

Moving away from the old white high efficacy voter turnout model is going to require hard work, which is why campaigns have be so hesitant to do so in the past. If there is one positive externality of today's divisive political climate, it's that it may actual lead to real youth and minority outreach efforts in traditional campaigns.

In what is some bad news for the Democratic candidates in November's midterm elections, young people simply aren't that excited to vote.

According to Gallup daily tracking poll data from March 1 - March 7, 18-29 year olds were the age group with the highest lack of enthusiasm toward voting, with 44 percent of respondents noting that they were "not enthusiastic" about voting in 2010.

One potential problem for Democrats is the lower enthusiasm about voting among young Americans. Twenty percent of registered voters aged 18 to 29 say they are very enthusiastic about voting this November. That compares with 31% to 39% of older age groups who are very enthusiastic.

Younger Americans are decidedly more Democratic than the national average. Thus, their apparent lack of motivation to vote -- if it continues until Election Day -- could deprive Democrats of the full benefit they could in theory derive if all 18- to 29-year-olds were to vote.

Democrats need to knock this number down quickly if they want to have anything resembling success this November. One way of doing that would be to pass comprehensive health care reform legislation. Young people want to see their politics made up of officeholders who are strong, problem-solving leaders, instead of weak, timid politicians.

While David Plouffe and Barack Obama drew praise with his outside-the-box approach in the 2008 election, including the amazing mobilization of thousands of new young voters, 2010 will be a different story for Democrats across the country unless something significantly changes. While it is only March, this is still very disappointing.

UPDATE: From Political Wire:

A new Harvard Institute of Politics poll of 18 to 29 year-olds finds young Republicans are showing more enthusiasm than young Democrats for participating in the upcoming midterm elections with 41% of Republicans planning on voting, compared to 35% of Democrats and 13% of Independents.

Once again, Gallup is trumpeting data claiming that youth interest in the election is the same as it was on 2004. The headline on their latest piece is "Little Evidence of Youth Surge." I've already seen this picked up on half a dozen blogs, including on Digby.

Here's what everyone should know about this Gallup poll:

• The margin of error for the youth sample is huge: +/- 7%.

So while Gallup's poll may show that young people are no more engaged than they were in 2004, and are still less likely to vote than older demographics . . .

. . . the margin of error is quite large. In addition, it may be hard to remember now, but there was a LOT of excitement in 2004, and it was excitement we saw on both sides of the aisle during a very close contest. By contrast, this election has all the signs of a blowout, and McCain's campaign has zero youth outreach and is actually kicking their own young supporters out of their events. There's a decent possibility that young McCain supporters are acting as a drag on these numbers. Look at the disproportionate amount of time and resources each campaign is devoting to energizing its young supporters (from Gallup's own data):

Regardless of self-reported measures of interest, the most interesting youth-vote statistic to watch on Tuesday won't be turnout, it will be the margin of victory that Obama enjoys over McCain. As I wrote yesterday in my post about Tips for Reporting the Youth Vote:

5. The margin of victory among young voters may be just as important as the overall increase in youth turnout. In 2004, 20 million young voters cast a ballot, with 54% selecting John Kerry. That gave Kerry an advantage of 1.6 million votes over President Bush among young voters. This year, if 22 million young voters cast ballots and 62% choosing Obama vs. 38% for McCain (numbers roughly found in most polling), that would give Senator Obama an advantage of 5.28 million votes.

One more thing about the Gallup poll - they are consistently underestimating youth share of the electorate, even in their "expanded likely voter model."

As a result, 18- to 29-year-olds now constitute 12% of Gallup's traditional likely voter sample, basically the same as the estimate in the final 2004 pre-election poll (13%). Gallup's expanded likely voter model, which defines likely voters differently (on the basis of current voting intentions only), estimates a slightly higher proportion of young voters in the electorate (14%). However, even if the share of the youth vote were adjusted upward, doing so has little or no impact on the overall Obama-McCain horse-race numbers using either likely voter model.

I'm loathe to look into a crystal ball and predict youth turnout, but young voters made up 16 - 17% of the electorate in 2004 (depending in the source of the data, Current Population Survey and Exit Polling, respectively). Gallup is setting the youth share in their models at 12 - 14%, at least two points lower.

For anyone taking the Gallup poll - or any other poll prematurely calling the youth vote - seriously, I recommend reading and spreading my Tips for Reporting on the Youth Vote. It's a good way to avoid the hysteria and common mistakes that frequently surround youth vote reporting.

A few days ago, Gallup released a new poll analysis and asked the question - how much will the youth vote really matter? Their answer was "probably not as much as we think." Now, I'm not a mathemagician, and it's quite possible that I'm misinterpreting something here, but I don't see how these estimates makes any sense:

Gallup runs two different Likely Voter models, a traditional one that tends to, in part, under-count new and young voters, and an expanded model that allows for their greater inclusion. Under both models, Gallup is predicting that 18 - 29 year-olds will make up no more than 14% of the electorate.

According to CIRCLE, in 2004, young voters were 21% of all eligible voters. This year, we are 22%. In 2004, young voters were 16 percent of the electorate. Gallup really thinks in a year of heightened youth enthusiasm, when young people make up a slightly greater portion of the eligible voting population, the youth share of the electorate is going to shrink by 2 - 4%? Really?

While I don't want to play "look into my crystal ball" and predict youth turnout/share, my money would have to be on something around 18% as a viable youth share of the electorate, a far cry from 12 or 14%. Here's another thing that's bugging me about this poll:

Obama leads McCain by 62% to 34% among registered voters 18 to 29 years of age, based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking interviewing conducted Oct. 1-20. [...] This strength of support for a Democratic presidential nominee among the youth is not a new phenomenon. In Gallup's final poll before the 2004 election, the Democratic nominee John Kerry received 59% of the support of 18- to 29-year-old registered voters, while the Republican George W. Bush received 36% support.

Sounds good, right? 62 - 34% isn't all that far off from 59 - 36%. Here's the catch - Gallup was wildly wrong about young voters in 2004. Kerry didn't beat Bush among youth by anything close to that 23-point margin. The final results showed Kerry winning the youth demographic by a much slimmer 9 percent: 54 - 45%.

Is Gallup just overcompensating this year and underestimating the youth vote because they got it so wrong in 2004? Can anyone shed some light on this?

Gallup has a new poll up looking at various demographic dynamics in the Obama-McCain general election matchup. Here's what they're showing for the different age demographics/generations:

There are two interesting things to note here:

1. As DemFromCT notes, Gen X appears to be losing it's conservative voting habits and turning to the left. This supports similar data reported by PEW earlier this year, and is super bad news for Republicans. Gen X - particularly the older members - have long been one of their most reliable voting demographics. In 2004, Bush won 30 - 44 year olds (Gen X and younger Boomers) 53 - 46%.
2. Obama's advantage among Millennials echoes what we saw in 2006 when young voters chose Democrats 60 - 38%. In 2004, Kerry won young voters by a much slimmer 54 - 45%, and young voters were 17% of the electorate.

If Gen X votes Democratic, or splits it's vote in November, and if young voters make up 19 or 20% of the electorate and vote for Obama by a 23 point margin, this is going to be a blowout up and down the ballot.

I've written in the past about the problems associated with polling young voters and how these are exacerbated by our habits of not owning a land-line. This is a growing problem for pollsters as more and more people abandon their landline and go cell-phone only.

This week, Gallup took a huge step forward in addressing these problems when they announced plans to begin including cell phones numbers in their surveys.

Still, Gallup has been studying and investigating the implications of cell phone only households for well over a year now. And, as of Jan. 1, 2008, Gallup has made the decision to include cell phone interviewing as part of the sample used for its general population studies.

This is a complex and costly modification in methodology. Our statisticians and methodologists have spent a great deal of time reviewing the procedures and implications of the change. Essentially, in addition to sampling from the traditional database of all landline telephone exchanges, Gallup now also adds in sampling from a new database of all cell phone telephone exchanges in the country. We screen for those individuals using cell phones who report not having a landline, and then interview a random sample thereof. We then weigh into the sample a proportionate percentage of these interviews conducted via cell phone.

We’re continually monitoring the methodology of our interviewing, and revise on a regular basis as appropriate. We'll be analyzing the implications of this shift in methods particularly carefully.

Mark Blumenthal has more on the consequences and significance of this change in methodology:

For now, at least, this change is not likely to produce dramatic differences in the results. The ongoing cell phone surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center have shown that the missing cell-phone-only population rarely makes a difference of more than a point or two. But that point or two may sometimes make a difference, especially in a close race. Consider last week's Gallup poll in New Hampshire. USA Today polling editor Jim Norman let us know, via email, that they included a cell-phone sample on that survey:

[I]t added a point to Obama's total and took one away from Clinton. In other words, without the cell-phone-only respondents, Obama's lead among likely voters was 11, not 13.

The bigger significance in this change is symbolic. Gallup is the granddaddy of all polling firms. Their polling "time series" goes back to the 1930s. As such, they are typically the most cautious about changes in methodology, so their move to regular cell-phone sampling is likely to have a big ripple effect on the polling industry. At very least, this most closely watched poll will provide a regular source of data on the potential impact of the cell-phone-only households that will be missing from other surveys.

If Gallup continues to adopt this as their standard, other polling firms will follow, and the "added costs" of collecting a large enough sample of younger voters will instead become the normal costs of doing business. Maybe then we'll see more polling that can reliably break out the opinions of young voters, which currently are subject to wide margins of error or ignored altogether.

If Gallup begins to show statistically different findings from other polls, you can be sure that this will happen.