MSNBC

Here's a shocker - more young viewers watched new CNN show with Erin Burnett than watched Chris Matthews. To be fair... did Chris Matthews ever have a youth following? Last night she even reported on Occupy Wall Street with sunglasses on!

Her new CNN show OutFront show drew 535k in total viewers, which is up 11% from what John King USA averaged in that time slot last month.

More importantly, at least in TV land, she attracted 215,000 viewers in the key 25-54 demo which is up a whopping 48% from what the 7pm slow was averaging in September.

To put that in context, Burnett topped Chris Matthew's Hardball in the key demo by 14%.

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.

Jessica Hillyard from pushback has a nice post up about Luke Russert that I wanted to echo.

Some people have discounted Luke Russert, speculating that his father’s unfortunate early death led some NBC higher-ups to offer him a job as a correspondent out of pity. Even though it’s easy to jump to such a conclusion upon seeing a privileged rookie ascend the career ladder so quickly, Russert has a particularly keen insight into our generation. In an interview with mediabistro.com, he demonstrates that he certainly has done his homework:

It seems that every election storyline is always, “young people will be coming out in record numbers,” and it never seems to happen. Do you think this year will be any different?

I do. From what I’ve seen on the ground, it certainly looks like kids will turn up in bigger numbers this year. But if you just look at the trajectory of the numbers, if we go from 2000 to 2004, there was a nine point increase in the number of kids who came out to vote. [For] the midterm elections in 2002 to 2006, there was a substantial increase as well, I believe in the range of eight to 10 points. At the primaries, 6.6 million young folks turned out to participate. So, given all of those statistics and those numbers, on paper it certainly looks like the youth vote will come this election.

That being said, no one really knows for sure. There [are] massive new voter registration numbers. If you look at the state of Virginia, there’s been since January, I think, about four or five hundred thousand people who have been registered to vote. Of those hundreds of thousands, people under 34 make up 62 percent of that new number. So if those folks come out to vote in a place like Virginia, it could really sway things. And I think they will. I mean, if they don’t come out in this election, I don’t know when they ever will come.

On one hand I agree with Jessica -- it's impressive and refreshing to me that Luke is right on with this topic, acting as an advocate for our movement in the traditional media and dispelling some of the lazy journalism that fails to recognize a pattern that has emerged in three straight election cycles now. A few weeks back, Russert appeared on Morning Joe with Daily Show writer Larry Wilmore. When asked if he thought youth would turn out in 2008, Wilmore said "absolutely not," and he and Willie Geist, the interviewer, yukked it up, totally ignorant about their ignorance. And then Russert stepped in and slowly explained what we already know. Watch for yourself (sorry about the beep at the beginning -- I looked for another video of the same clip but couldn't find it):

At 1:10, Russert disagrees, as he explains the trajectory, rattling off the numbers that show improvement from 2002 to 2006 and the improvement in turnout from 2000 to 2004. Unfortunately Geist and Wilmore laugh it off, and Geist still shows he has no clue what he's talking about, equating the whole youth vote with "urban hipsters" wearing Obama paraphernalia, saying he doesn't think they'll get out of bed to vote.

Unfortunately this statement is why I might add one caveat onto Jessica's analysis. While Russert gets the job done and knows everything he needs to know, blowhards like Geist don't take him seriously enough because he's not someone they can suck up to. He's still "young," and therefore no matter how many facts he offers, Geist (and others) will never feel motivated enough by someone like Russert to actually do some journalism and check out the numbers for himself.

Last week I noted that the Wall Street Journal, NBC and MySpace released a joint poll in which they attempted to gauge the views of "new" and "lapsed" voters, who were defined as voters who had participated in the past, but skipped the 2004 election. At the time, I warned that there was a danger in making the mistake of equating these voters and the poll's results with the opinions of young voters.

Well, I just saw an MSNBC interview between Chuck Todd and Lee Brenner of MySpace in which both Todd and Brenner make this mistake multiple times during the segment. Brenner even goes so far as to suggest that the results of the poll accurately reflect the views of "students," a distinction made no where in the poll's methodology.

As I noted in my previous blog post, 45% of the survey respondents were over the age of 30. 39% of the sample was over 35 years of age. In my world, those don't count as young voters. The vast majority of the statistics discussed by Brenner and Todd make no distinction between those older and younger respondents in the poll, or between "new" and "lapsed" voters, who surely have different levels of interest and engagement. These respondents - and the results of this poll - shouldn't be equated with all young voters.

The WSJ/NBC/MySpace poll offered some unique information on new and lapsed voters. But that information can't be examined in a vacuum and it shouldn't be used to infer things about young voters generally. For a complimentary, and I think more accurate, look at what young voters are thinking this election cycle, I recommend the recent non-partisan poll released by Rock the Vote, Lake Research, and The Tarrance Group.

The McCain campaign loves to focus on Barack Obama's "exotic" person, his "celebrity," or whatever you'd like to call it.

Rachel Maddow, in this segment of tonight's Road to the White House, nails Jay Carney of Time for suggesting that Obama's "unknown" to Americans. Take a look:

Let's reexamine what Rachel says:

There's a story to tell about John McCain, though, that makes him just as unknowable. The guy with nine houses. The guy with $520 shoes. The guy that dumped his first wife and married the beer heiress...

He's been on the scene for a longer time, but how many people know he has nine homes? How many people know he has $520 shoes. We don't focus on John McCain because people don't report it with the same intensity and fervor that they report every personal detail about Barack Obama and what he eats for breakfast.

Having watched Rachel this whole year, I don't think she wants to get into this back and forth discussion on a topic of so little substance.

But I think what she was getting at is valuable. The media and its punditocracy play dumb when pondering the question they so often ask: "Why is Barack Obama not winning in such a Democratic year?" How do they do this? And why are they doing this? They offer the standard "he's an unknown politician," "he doesn't have a core," or, if you're Pat Buchanan, "he's exotic." Perhaps, as Rachel suggests, the traditional media is complicit in this very uneasiness they're reporting with Obama.

Thoughts?

MSNBC has a good piece on the youth vote noting how you target young people and how cost effective and democratizing online outreach can be. No mention of the effectiveness of peer to peer organizing and connecting the online action to offline, but still very good overall.