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Youth Turnout on Election Day Exceeded 1992 Peak, Scholars and Voting Groups Say
by Eric Hoover, November 5, 2004

Initial reports that college students voted in underwhelming numbers on Election Day were based on incomplete and incorrect conclusions about the student turnout, according to experts on student voting who have been studying the election results since Tuesday.

Hours before television news anchors projected the winner of the presidency, they declared young voters losers. The evidence: exit polls showing that 18-to-24-year-olds had accounted for fewer than one in 10 voters -- about the same as in the 2000 election.

But as campaign posters were coming down this week, students, scholars, and voter-mobilization groups challenged the fast-crystallizing conventional wisdom that young voters had vanished.

They cited compelling data suggesting that young Americans had, in fact, made their strongest showing ever at the polls. According to an analysis of exit polls and early-vote tallies released on Wednesday by the Center for Information & Research on Civil Learning & Engagement, at the University of Maryland at College Park , at least 20.9 million people ages 18 to 29 voted on Tuesday, an increase of 28 percent, or 4.6 million, over 2000.

The center, which is known as Circle, also estimated that the young voters' turnout rose by 9.3 percentage points, to 51.6 percent from 42.3 percent four years ago. The previous peak came in 1992, when 47.9 percent of young Americans voted.

The turnout among under-30 voters was significantly higher in battleground states, Circle noted. A sharp jump in the overall number of voters, however, obscured increases among young voters, who made up the same proportion -- 18 percent -- of the national turnout as they did in 2000. "Young people increased at the same rate that everybody else did, and in order to do that, they had to reverse a 30-year trend of decline," said Peter Levine, deputy director of the center. Americans in the 18-to-29 age group account for 22 percent of the national population. Since 2000 the age group has shrunk slightly as a percentage of eligible voters.

Voting groups hailed Circle's numbers as proof that their estimated $40-million national effort to mobilize so-called slackers had paid off.

During the presidential campaign, nonpartisan groups like Rock the Vote said they hoped to get 20 million 30-and-under voters out on Election Day (MTV dubbed the push "20 Million Loud").

"All the money was to increase their voting rate," said Hans Riemer, director of Rock the Vote's Washington office. "We never set out to increase their share of the electorate, which you can't control."

The estimated nine-percentage-point increase in turnout for the age group "is off the board," Mr. Riemer said. Anne B. Botteri, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, at Saint Anselm College, said she thought Circle's data were accurate and called the numbers "cataclysmically positive."

"Based on what I've seen, I have to believe that a huge part of the increase in voter turnout is attributable to young voters," she said. "I've just seen an absolute crusade."

Tilting Democratic

While young Americans may have met or exceeded the goals set by voting groups, they did not fulfill the hopes of Democrats who had predicted that winning an overwhelming chunk of the youth vote would tip the election to Sen. John Kerry. As the returns came in, some left-leaning bloggers railed against the under-30 set.

Yet Circle found that young voters, while no electoral monolith, had done their part for Democrats in key states. Sixty-four percent of the young Americans in 10 battleground states cast ballots, up 13 percentage points from the totals in the same states in 2000, according to the center's analysis.

And exit polls showed they also chose Senator Kerry over President Bush by a wide margin -- 54 percent to 44 percent. They were the only age group that went for the Democrat. In 2000 young voters chose Al Gore over President Bush by just over one percentage point.

David C. King, associate director of Harvard University 's Institute of Politics , called the turnout "historic" and predicted that the reported total would rise. Exit polls, he noted, did not capture students who had voted by absentee ballot. A recent poll by the institute found that 42 percent of college students had planned to do so.

Virginia21, a Richmond-based youth-advocacy group, says it provided absentee ballots to at least 19,000 college students, accounting for 12 percent of the ballots requested in Virginia . Exit polls in the state found that young voters made up 17 percent of total voters, one percentage point less than elderly voters.

Just how loudly the electoral voice of college students in particular was heard may not be clear for some time. Voting experts say it is difficult to measure the actual voting rates of students, who account for only a fraction of the under-30 population.

But a potentially illuminating glimpse of student turnout might come from Richard Niemi, a political-science professor at the University of Rochester, who plans to release the findings of post-election field surveys of students within the next few days.

Whatever final snapshot of student voters develops, some observers in academe wonder if there is a limit to what colleges can do to get students to the polls. "It's almost too late by the time they get to college," said Ms. Botteri, at Saint Anselm. "I don't think we do a very good job as a society of acknowledging the first-time voting experience."

In a recent meeting with staff members, she wondered aloud what might happen if parents could buy specialized greeting cards for their children, to celebrate the milestone. On her to-do list: Write a letter to the president of Hallmark.

Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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