I expect that this article is going to be the cause of a lot of yelling and hand-wringing about young voters, but read the fine print: It doesn't actually say much. washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…
The main datapoint in the article is a snapshot of voter registration info from eight states, looking at young voters' registration as a percentage of the whole. It finds a modest uptick between February and May.
But it only measures young voters as a part of the whole, so its finding is best summarized as "young people registered to vote this spring at a somewhat higher rate than other people."
If that doesn't strike you as much to hang a "young people aren't going to be a major factor in this election" story on, we're on the same page.
Measures of voter enthusiasm show a spike for young people this cycle, as the article grudgingly points out. How big of an impact will that be in November? We don't know.
But every stat cited in the article—every single one—points to a higher than usual youth turnout this year. The big question is how large that effect is going to be.
And we have lots of data showing that young people really really hate Trump, too. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the GOP is going to have a really rough time with young voters in 2018.
Anyway. We don't know for sure. But as always, be wary of "young people suck" narratives.
Oh, and be sure to click through to the various studies and articles linked in the WaPo piece. Some of them, like this from the Times, paint a very different picture. nytimes.com/2018/05/20/us/…
So much of this depends on how you cut the stats, too. Not just which stats you use, but how you report them. And this article chose the framing that returns the least dramatic numbers, whatever the data say.
