Facts on Voter Trends in America

[Lennie Irvin]

"Facts on Voting Trends in America" shares the startling statistic that only 32 percent of youth age 18-24 vote. The article details why youth don't vote, citing reasons like politicians being out of touch and the lack of information. The article, however, shares information from a Harvard survey that indicates youth would be more likely to vote if voter registration were made easier and if political information were made more accessible. (71 words)

Analysis

Despite this article presenting information pertaining to the 2000 election, I think its main points about voter lack of participation in youth and the possible ways to change that are still important today. What I like about it is that it points to data indicating what might promote increased participation from youth in the election and voting process.

[Christy Kaupert]

Did you catch this article last week Lennie?
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Americans Flunk Simple 3-Question Political Survey
livescience.com – Wed Oct 15, 5:25 pm ETSome news audiences are more politically savvy than others, according to a new poll, with readers of The New Yorker and similar high-brow magazines being the most knowledgeable.

The survey, conducted between April 30 and June 1 by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, measured the political knowledge of 3,612 U.S. adults. Participants were asked to name the controlling party of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. secretary of state and Great Britain's prime minister.

Overall, just 18 percent of participants answered all three questions correctly.

More than 50 percent of Americans knew that the Democrats have a majority in the House, while 42 percent could identify the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice). Less than 30 percent could name the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown).

Perfect scores
The best-informed news audiences crossed the ideological spectrum. Nearly half of regular readers of The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper's Magazine answered all three political knowledge questions correctly.

A perfect score was obtained by 44 percent of regular listeners of National Public Radio (NPR), 43 percent of regular viewers of MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and 42 percent of the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" audience. Thirty-four percent of "The Colbert Report" audience and 30 percent of "The Daily Show" audience got all three questions correct.

While most news audiences knew that Democrats have a majority in the House, participants struggled to correctly name the current British prime minister.

Just four news audiences had a majority who correctly identified Gordon, including regular readers of The New Yorker and similar magazines such as The Atlantic, regular NPR listeners, regular readers of political magazines, such as The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and regular viewers of "Hardball."

Just 44 percent of BBC viewers identified the prime minister correctly.

Here's a detailed breakdown of the percentage of individuals answering each of the three questions correctly from the different news audiences:

The New Yorker/Atlantic: 71 percent (correctly identified Democrats as the majority in the House), 71 percent (correctly identified Condeleeza Rice), 59 percent (correctly identified Gordon Brown)
NPR: 73 percent, 72 percent, 57percent
Hannity & Colmes: 84 percent, 73 percent, 49 percent
Rush Limbaugh: 83 percent, 71 percent, 41 percent
Colbert Report: 73 percent, 65 percent, 49 percent
Daily Show: 65 percent, 48 percent, 36 percent
NewsHour: 66 percent, 52 percent, 47 percent
O'Reilly Factor: 70 percent, 60 percent, 41 percent
C-SPAN: 63 percent, 59 percent, 35 percent
Letterman/Leno: 51 percent, 42 percent, 31 percent
CNN: 59 percent, 48 percent, 29 percent
National Enquirer: 44 percent, 32 percent, 22 percent

Education factor
In general, well-educated news audiences scored high on political knowledge. For instance, 54 percent of the regular readers of publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper's Magazine are college graduates, as are 54 percent of regular NPR listeners.

However, several news audiences with relatively low proportions of college graduates also scored well on the news quiz. Just 31 percent of regular "Hannity & Colmes" viewers are college graduates. Even still, 42 percent Hannity viewers got perfect scores on the political knowledge quiz, compared with 44 percent of NPR listeners.

Nearly 40 percent of the regular audience of the news parody "The Colbert Report" are college graduates, compared with 30 percent of "The Daily Show" viewers. Both shows have younger audiences than other TV news sources, with less than a quarter of Colbert and Daily Show viewers over the age of 50, compared with more than half of "Hardball" and "Hannity & Colmes" viewers being 50 and older.

[Christy Kaupert]

Well, of course, party is a factor when we vote and when I hear people say they 'vote for the candidate and not the party' it amuses me. Personally, I consider myself an 'enlightened libertarian' but I have yet to find an libertarian candidate with whom I can agree on outside the realm of 'social issues'. Parties are, whether we vote for "them" or the "candidate that represents them" is what we get. That is the reality.

By and large, Schattschneider (and Lowi after him)was on to something when he talked about the "Responsible Party Model" http://www.jstor.org/pss/419701 but unfortunately because of the role the Media has played (and this means not always positive or to advance the civil discourse where candidates and issues are concerned), money has become king in campaigns.

Money, in large part USED to be controlled by the Party mechanism itself, and certainly the 'smoke-filled rooms' of the last century did create machines and 'figure heads' at least the PARTY controlled them. In other words, a Democrat was a Democrat and a Republican was a Republican and so on and so on. Political Scientists over the last decade or so, watched very carefully the role the internet began to play in elections, particularly in mobilizing voters and specifically, the youth vote----afterall, they ARE children borne out of the 'information age'.

That said, it has always remained true that Americans, through their vote, can take a candidate out of office as often as they can put them in. It pains me to hear students say we are less democratic today; because in fact, we are not. We need only look at the laws (and changes made to our Constitution) that expanded suffrage beyond the property-owning, free white males entitled to vote at the founding of our nation to see this. Of course, just because people CHOOSE not to participate in their own governance does not make our country less democratic, but it does make it less pluralistic.

I commend you on what you have done here. If students realized that EVERYTHING is politics, even down to the level of their family, perhaps they might be more interest in learning about the subject; but to expect them to come to us from high school, where they learn for 15 weeks out of the entire 4 years they are there about the structure and rudimentary functions of their government is a bit polly-annaish of us.

This site should remain up EVEN after the elections----the state legislature opens session in less than 4 months and arguably, what IT does is far closer to home in terms of what affects the lives of our students and us.

Good job Lennie-----you are making my job MUCH easier!

[Lennie Irvin]

I think you are right on about young voters not having the context to make informed choices. Heck, I voted Libertarian my first chance to vote--what was I thinking! It seems ironic to me since one of the goals of public education is to create citizens, yet they emerge from public school unready to participate. Despite 18-21 year old's notorious apathy, I think it is still worth it to do things like this forum and engage these students in thinking about the election. It all may not make sense now, but it plants the seeds for future participation (...I hope). Ideally, it might get them to vote this election.

[Christy Kaupert]

You know Lennie, for years, political scientists have bemoaned the level of participation among the youth. If you go back to the 1970s, the discussion of extending franchise to those 18-21 was grounded in the arguments surrounding the draft. Of course, it was argued that those facing the draft should have the ability to participate in the electoral process. By granting these young men the right to vote, some argued that electoral outcomes (and hence policy respecting the war, ostensibly) would be different.
Once the 18-21 year olds were granted the vote we effectively increased the universe of eligible (and potentially registered) voters, but created the illusion that voter turnout actually declined. Please consider these two files below

http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/p20-228/tab01.pdf

http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/p20-253/tab01.pdf

That said, we know, almost as assuredly as the sun will rise the next day, the youth vote cannot be counted on to effect change. The factors that influence the likelihood of voting are just too weak at this life stage----
We have attempted to make voter registration easier, and of course with the "Motor-Voter Act" this has only served to expand the universe of registered voters even more. The reality is, simply, in as much as the youth have access to more information than our generation ever did, they find this information overwhelming because this information lacks context. Most young people do not know how their government functions and to offer an analogy, this is a little bit like realizing your car is out of gas, but not knowing how to work the gas pump or where to put the gas to fix the problem.