Dem Advantage Among Young Voters Returns to Pre-2008 Levels

Written By: Jed Lewison

Posted from Daily Kos

Pew Research has a new report on party identification among young voters (born in 1981 or later), revealing that the Democratic advantage among these voters has returned to pre-2008 levels.

Here's a chart showing the change from 2008's peak to the end of 2009:

As you can see, the Democratic party ID advantage shrunk from a massive 32 points in 2008 to a significant but still smaller 14 point advantage at the end of 2009. Note that most of that shift occurred among leaners, however. Among those solidly committed to a party, the Dem advantage shrunk from 19 points to 12, a much smaller shift.

The more important point is that these numbers don't reflect a longterm collapse in Democratic support; rather, they reflect a drop-off from the 2008 campaign. Examine this chart, created by Pew, illustrating that the numbers from late 2009 represent a return to pre-2008 levels:

Finally, it's clear that the numbers don't reflect a shift among younger voters towards a more conservative brand of political ideology. While young voters have expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in DC as well as the war in Afghanistan, they are still the most liberal age cohort examined by Pew, and unlike party ID, their ideological views have held steady over the past few years:

A separate Pew survey revealed that younger voters don't pay as much attention to politics as older voters. That's no surprise, but it is a reminder to Democrats that in order to win large majorities of younger voters in elections -- particularly mid-terms -- they need to develop strategies to reach those voters similar to the ones used by the Obama campaign in 2008. The risk isn't so much that younger voters will vote heavily for Republicans -- it's simply that they won't vote.