Easing Your Election Hangover
Posted on November 5, 2008
Filed Under News, The Daily Prereq, The Youth Vote | By Jessica Dye
Congratulations, college students! After years of vowing to ROCK THE VOTE, you finally made good on your promises not to sleep through polling hours and actually got out and did your civic duty (was it because Jessica Alba told you to?). And it was awesome, right? We should do this every year!
Just kidding. Once every four years is probably too much excitement for your Prereq editors, half of whom are still out there somewhere, wandering the streets of New York covered in stickers and still a little drunk from all that hope and cheap champagne. But you college kids? You done good, no matter what party got your vote:
- Young people (18-29) represented 18 percent of all voters yesterday, up one percent from 2004. To put this in perspective, young people only make up 21 percent of the eligible voting population.
- The AP reported that young voters preferred Obama to McCain by a ratio of 2 to 1, according to exit poll data. By contrast, more than half of voters over the age of 65 said they voted for McCain.
- According to the LA Times, 2.5 million new youth voters were registered to vote for the first time during this election. The overall number of youth voters in primaries and caucuses has doubled over the past eight years–and that’s not even counting all the votes from last night.
- Update: And just how many more? According to nonpartisan research center CIRCLE, between 21.6 and 23.9 million voters between 18-29 years old voted, up 2.2 million from 2004. It’s the highest recorded youth turnout since 1972.
We’ve only got one day left to get all this politics stuff out of our systems for at LEAST the next five or six months (is it too soon to start picking sides for the 2012 primaries???), so stay tuned for more as students across the country wake up to find the decisions they made last night were, for once, right on.
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