Youth Vote

One of the arguments for Democrats being the future is that they have a huge stranglehold on the 18-29 year old group. These people will continue to be Democrats and they'll have a huge advantage with new 18-29 year olds. Below is an estimate of the raw vote of each party for House of Representative elections 2004-2010. I used House elections rather than Presidential elections, because the Presidential election is influenced by who is running. That guy won't be running in ten years. The House member, or someone similar, should be.

From 2004 to 2006 both parties lost around 4.1 million voters who stayed home. I know that some people entered and others exited this group, but if the Democrats are going to maintain this dominance the incoming voters have to vote just like the outgoing ones. Some may have switched from one party to another, but I don't have any data on that.

In 2008, Democrats got 8 million new 18-29 year old voters, while Republicans got less than 4 million. In 2010, Republicans got a similar number of voters as they had in 2006, while the Democrats had 600,000 less. Overall, Democrats lost 8.7 million 18-29 voters, while Republicans lost 3.8 million. Democrats actually had over 600,000 less voters than they did in 2006, while Republicans had 22,000 more.

If the Democrats are going to keep these voters they can't count on Buch or Obama to be on the ballot in future elections. Winning this group 58%-42%, as they did in 2010 is still very good if not the dominant position of 2008. In 2010 they did similarly with the 30-49 segment as they did in 2004. Obviously only 20% of the 30-49 year old group is made up of people who were 18-29 in 2006. So it's not significant enough to have that big an impact. If the 18-29 vote was going to translate they should be doing a little bit better with 30-49 than they were in 2006. Yet they were worse.

But it was a Republican year, you might argue. You can't expect the Democrats to do as well. I'd expect Republican votes to go up, but expect that the Democrats would be similar to 2006. The drop off, as a percentage of voters, was worse than the Republicans had going from a good Republican year in 2004 to a bad one in 2008. If the Democrats are to have a stranglehold on the ballot box, the voters will have to show up not just in years where they're voting against George Bush or for Barack Obama. It's likely some were voting for reasons other than ideology. They aren't committed Democrats.