wall street journal

In the Wall Street Journal today, reporter Sarah Murray mangles the data from a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC/MySpace poll to produce an article that casts doubt on the engagement of young voters without any regard for recent trends in youth voting: New Voters Back Obama, Turnout Unsure. This is the second time in less than a month that she has done so in the pages of The Journal.

There are a number of problems with Murray's analysis. Most importantly, Murray over-represents the number of youth respondents in the poll, and then uses a deck stacked with older, "lapsed" voters to cast doubt on youth turnout next week.

Here's Murray over-representing young voter respondents in the poll data:

Three-quarters of those surveyed are young voters registering for the first time, and Sen. Obama has been working to mobilize such voters since his primary fight against Sen. Hillary Clinton.

This is demonstrably not true. Here is the demographic make-up of the poll by age:

Age Group	% Respondents
18-20	31
21-24	16
25-29	8
30-34	8
35-39	9
40-44	5
45-49	4
50-54	6
55-59	2
60-64	4
65-69	3
70-74	2
75 and over	2

Looking at this data, only 56 percent of the poll respondents are under 30 years of age, 19 points shy of "three quarters." In fact, the youngest "three quarters" of poll respondents would range in age from 18 to their low 40s. That may fly in the Republican Party, but common sense should tell you that a 40 year old is no longer a 'young voter' by any reasonable standard.

The implication throughout Murray's article, though, is that "Obama's youth supporters may not show up:"

There still are warning signs, however, that new voters -- traditionally difficult to get to the polls on Election Day -- could be unreliable. Just 66% of those voters said they would definitely vote this year, compared with 90% of registered voters overall. Additionally, only six in 10 said they were very interested in the election, compared with eight in 10 of the larger electorate. [...]

"The challenge now for the Obama campaign is not one of persuasion," said Mr. Newhouse, the Republican pollster. "The challenge to the Obama campaign is what we call stimulus; it's getting them out to vote."

Bottom line? This is the same "youth don't vote" story we've heard for years dressed up with "new voters" as a euphemism for "young voters." The data is stacked with information from hundreds of respondents that could in no way be considered young voters, and Murray's reporting does not take into account any recent youth vote trends in its reporting to provide context for their findings.

Here's what we know that didn't make it into Murray's story:

• We know that youth turnout rose in 2004, rose again in 2006, and was double, triple, and in some states quadruple previous turnout during the primaries.
• We know that Senator Obama and independent youth organizations have worked tirelessly to register new, young voters this cycle.
• Most importantly, we know that when young people are registered to vote, they turnout in numbers that are comparable to older registered voters. In 2004, 81.6% of all registered youth actually cast their ballot.

No one knows what youth turnout will look like until the polls are closed on election day, but all the trends are highly favorable. It's disappointing to see the Wall Street Journal continue to misread their own, uncontextualized data to cast doubts on the intentions of young voters.

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 Wall Street Journal, NBC and MySpace released a new poll today examining the attitudes of "new" and "lapsed" voters. The poll is unique in that it breaks out these two under-reported groups, however news coverage of the results by both The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC paint an overly grim picture of the potential turnout among these voters that is unsupported by the data.

In her WSJ story today on the poll, Sara Murray writes:

The survey, conducted by the Wall Street Journal, NBC News and the MySpace networking Web site, also found these voters have distinctly more positive impressions of Sen. Obama than any of the other three candidates atop the Democratic and Republican tickets.

But that hardly means the Obama campaign can count on them. When asked to rank their interest in the Nov. 4 election, just 49% said they were "very interested." By comparison, 70% of voters of all age groups said they were "very interested," according to a separate Journal/NBC News national poll taken a week ago.

Moreover, 54% of the new voters said they would definitely vote Nov. 4.

Murray is cherry picking her data here. Looking at the internals of the poll, respondents were asked to rank the likelihood of their voting on a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 being "definitely voting" and 1 being "definitely not voting." It's true that 54% responded with a 10, but what Murray leaves out is that 30% more respondents chose "8" or "9" - pretty high numbers on the scale. That means that 84% of respondents were very likely to vote. If you add in any respondents above "5", that number jumps 90%.

When it comes to interest in the election, Murray made the same editorial decision, including only respondents who answered with a "10" on a 10 point scale. Adding in the "8s" and "9s" again, and we see that 78% of respondents were very interested in the election, far higher than the 49% cited in the article.

In both instances, Murray uses only the most extreme levels of support in her examples. That had the effect of driving down the overall numbers and raised doubts about turnout among new and lapsed voters. While that may have fit her storyline, it was far from an accurate representation of the poll's findings.

Recognizing that we shouldn't automatically equate young voters with "new and lapsed" voters (though there is much overlap and both the WSJ and MSNBC blur the distinction), I want to point out that when you add in the additional response data, the broad trends here echo polling released by Rock the Vote in recent weeks. In a survey of young voters conducted in September, Rock the Vote found that 87% of young voters were following the election either "closely" or "very closely." They also found that 86% of young voters were either "likely" or "extremely likely" to vote this year. These numbers are almost identical to those found in the WSJ/NBC poll once you add in the very clearly interested respondents cut out of the article.

What's more, when discussing both statistics, Rock the Vote and their pollster Celinda Lake took a decidedly different view of their meaning. In a recent conference call presentation of the poll, Lake noted that the results are at record highs and are backed by favorable trends from the previous elections. In 2006, only 69% of young people stated that they were likely to vote. The results that November? A Democratic landslide in which young voters played a key role in the elections of Jon Tester, Jim Webb, and Joe Courtney. Just this past February, Rock the Vote found that 80% of young people were interested in the election. The corollary at the polls? In primary after primary contest we saw youth turnout double, triple, and even quadruple over turnout from previous years.

Murray's interpretation takes none of this recent history into account (emphasis mine):

These new voters are being closely watched by both political parties this fall. Regular Wall Street Journal/NBC News national polls indicate that these first-time and returning voters could account for between 10% and 13% of the November electorate.

The findings of the survey underscore the opportunities and the hurdles that face the Obama campaign. It has spent millions of dollars to register voters, as well as on plans to get them to the polls.

Traditionally it has been highly difficult for campaigns to get newly registered voters, especially young ones, to show up on Election Day.

It's not hard to get young people to show up on election day, it's just that neither party, and only very few candidates, ever put in the requisite work to do so. What we know from past election is that peer to peer outreach works in getting new voters to the polls - particularly young, first time voters. We know that such strategies have successfully increased the youth vote in the last three election cycles. And we know that Barack Obama is better than any candidate in decades at getting those voters to the polls.

The millions of dollars the Obama campaign sunk into youth registration and GOTV were well spent, and the campaign has reaped the rewards of those investments ever since new, mostly young, voters propelled him to victory in the Iowa caucuses.

The explosion of new voters isn't a hurdle for Obama, it's an opportunity. The fact that these unlikely and first time voters are so excited about this election is a chance to reach out our hand and welcome them into the political process. The Obama campaign understands this. Young organizers, who have worked for 5 years to bring the youth vote to the forefront understand this. Some people in the media still don't get it.

Here's a great example of the media spoiling for a fight that just isn't there. The Wall Street Journal has a dizzying piece in today's edition suggesting that Sarah Palin is the GOP's ticket to connecting with young voters and cutting into Obama's sizable lead among our peers. The only problem is that almost every fact in the piece disputes that thesis.

Here's a rundown on why I'm not buying it.

With colleges back in session and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on board as the Republican vice presidential nominee, social conservatives are intensifying efforts to woo young voters, a demographic they once all but conceded to the Democrats.

The article certainly isn't talking about the McCain campaign here. If you go to the McCain/Palin website, there is not student or youth section to be found. As far as I know, they have no field plan for reaching out to young voters, and with only 50 odd days before the election, almost no time in which to execute a new plan from scratch:

Sen. Obama has spent well over a year building ties to young voters and college campuses. Young voters are notoriously hard to get to the polls, unless they're repeatedly contacted in person. "It's not clear," Mr. Green said, "that the McCain campaign has the infrastructure."

So who, exactly, is going to be connecting with young voters on behalf of the campaign?

At a string of Christian rock concerts in the swing states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the nonprofit group Redeem the Vote plans to mobilize voters by interspersing the music with calls to end legal abortion.

The antiabortion group Students for Life, meanwhile, has announced plans to flood YouTube with videos urging young people to activism in the fall campaign.

Ah, Christian Right groups looking for some hot culture war action! Only problem is, most young people don't care about the culture war. They've got bigger fish to fry like Global Warming and a tanking economy that threatens their debt-ridden future:

They plan to focus their youth effort on a few issues, including abortion. Although voters of all ages rank abortion quite low as a political priority, polls show the under-30 crowd is receptive to strict limits on abortion, and young evangelicals -- potential swing voters this election -- are more conservative than their parents on the issue.

...

Pew Research Center poll from 2006 found that 46% of people age 18 to 30 believe abortion should be banned outright or permitted only in a few circumstances. But that still means more than half support legal abortion. And many young people know someone who has made the choice to end a pregnancy; some 600,000 abortions a year are performed on women under 25.

So how effective has Palin, the GOP's new culture warrior, been so far in converting young voters to the Republican nominee?

Polls taken after the Republican convention don't show Sen. McCain cutting into the Democrats' lead among young voters; his support hovers around 33% in that group. But conservatives aren't giving up.

To recap:
Lacking any infrastructure with which to reach out to young voters, Sarah Palin is going to help the McCain campaign eat into Obama's lead among young voters. This will happen because conservative christian groups will hold a few one-off concerts, possibly after voter registration deadlines have passed, and targeted to voters who were never going to vote for Obama anyway. These concerts will focus on an issue of little voting significance to Millennials. So far, there is no evidence that Palin's presence on the ticket or these strategies will have any impact on the race.

And how did the Wall Street Journal frame this article?

Right . . .

I'm not sweating this one . . .