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Conventional Wisdom immediately following the election was that the youth turnout this year ws nothing to write home about. It was expected that there would be an extremely large youth turnout, but initially, the media was finding no evidence of it.

Luckily, some actual data has come out and it appears that the youth did in fact show up in much greater numbers than in 2000, and in fact it was the largest youth turnout since 1972, the first year that 18-21 year olds could vote.

The main reason for the initial underwhelming exit polls was that since there was a larger turnout in general, the 18-29 year old demographic didn’t increase it’s share of the total.

Crowded Polls Dilute Youth Turnout

CIRCLE researchers based their calculations on exit polls done for The Associated Press and others by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and found that 18- to 29-year-old turnout was up by 4.6 million voters and more than nine percentage points from exit poll data from the 2000 election.

The figures also beat exit poll numbers from 1992, the last time the youth vote spiked amid an otherwise general decline in turnout since 18-year-olds first got the chance to vote in 1972.

Turnout increased among other age groups, too, leaving young voters with roughly the same proportion of the total electorate nationally as in 2000. But activists who were part of an unprecedented effort to get out the vote — from Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself to the Youth Vote Coalition — felt that didn’t detract from their accomplishment.

Take heart my peers and young friends, the foundation is there…

Why Democrats Should Be Thankful

The only solace for sullen Democrats is that now Republicans might have to clean up their own fiscal mess. The fiscal record of the past four years has been one of unmitigated—and seemingly intentional—irresponsibility. A Republican Congress working with a Republican president created the massive new Medicare prescription-drug entitlement, passed a new, subsidy-crammed farm bill, committed hundreds of billions of dollars to war efforts, and loaded up on pork-barrel spending. Meanwhile, taxes were reduced—on wage earners, investors, and companies. The end result: We collected about the same amount of taxes in fiscal 2004 as we did in fiscal 1999. But we spent 34 percent more.

A large amount of people in the country are currently believing (taking it on faith, I guess) that Bush has done or will do a good job with fiscal issues. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. It doesn’t bode well for the country when they believe they got a mandate (when did 51% become a mandate?), and will most likely govern with promises of “tax-relief”, while at the same time spending even more.

Apparently through a lifetime of privelege and irresponsibility, no one ever taught these guys that when you charge stuff on the credit card, you generally are expected to pay it back.

But in this case, paying it back means taxing your unborn children and grandchildren to death.

I pulled this from a Minneapolis email list that I am on,

No matter how you cut it, this was a great day for voter turn out in MN.

77% of eligible voters turned out, 95% of registered voters showed up.

That makes me feel good.

Well, Kerry just gave his concession speech, Bush is supposed to be on soon.

I’m pretty worn out from my volunteering yesterday. I knocked on about 450 doors in 11 hours yesterday. It was tiring but satisfying. Basically I just asked if they had voted, and if they knew where their polling place was, and told them how to register if they weren’t registered.

I haven’t had any free moments yet to gather together the obviously disapointing result. But I did read Joshua Marshall’s thoughts, and I think that they are worthy of sharing.

In some ways this would all be conceptually easier for Democrats to deal with if President Bush had managed a realignment of our politics in the post-9/11 world. But when I look at the results from last night what I see is that they are virtually identical to four years ago. Pretty much the same states going each way and a very close to even race — though of course the president’s 51% makes all the difference in the world.

As I said, if the Dems had been crushed, that would be one thing. If the American people were coalescing away from them, etc. But that’s not what has happened here. In 2000 the country was divided into two (increasingly hostile) camps. And it’s still exactly the same way. If anything it seems only more entrenched — perhaps symbolically and geographically captured by the flip between New Hampshire and New Mexico from 2000.

Read the full post, it’s well worth it.

I’ll post some more thoughts soon… and my list of possible countries to move to. 😉

I was at my polling place at 6:40am this morning, it opened at 7am. This was the line behind me when I got there.

By the time I voted, that line was 3 times as long, and the little voting machine said 94 people had voted.

I’m off to knock on doors and get people to the polls. Go vote!

I just signed up to volunteer with ACT for their get-out-the-vote effort on Nov. 2. I am working from 8am until 7:30pm, apparently going door to door, asking people to vote.

We will see. I’m sure it will be an exhausting, but hopefully productive day.

(And they said I should bring some other people with me. Anyone interested?)

Well, I have come to another lull in the posting. I will have to once again blame it on all the pent up emotions regarding the election. I need it to be over.

But as many have pointed out, Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire was a moment of sheer joy for me. Time will tell if it made any difference, but there was an essential truth in the whole exchange. The volume knob of “debate” needs to be turned way down in this country, so the actual voices can be heard.

As it is, we have this din of primal grunting and shouting around the fire. It’s not helping. When we have polls showing 70% of people from Tennesee saying they are “very interested” in the election and then something like 75% of them not able to answer a simple quiz on which candidate supports what issue, we have a serious problem.