Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Democracy in action: dividing the country or revealing a delusional minority?

Macheath · 11-10-2004, 03:29 AM

I just want to have a bit of a look at your second point.

I think "...with record turnout Kerry still lost by 3.5 million popular votes." is a LITTLE misleading considering that, aside from Gore's popular vote win of 2000, it was the closest popular vote since 1976 when the margin was 1,682,790. By contrast, George HW Bush lost the popular vote in 1992 by 5,805,334 votes.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html

I don't think the "Rock the vote" type things were an unmitigated failure either. 5 million more young people voted in 2004 than in 2000 and national exit polls indicate 54 percent of these young people voted for Kerry. You have to consider the cost of getting someone to vote. This was a big money election and you have to ask, how much does it cost to get a million young Kerry voters to the polls versus the cost of a million "value voters" for Bush?

The linked article suggests that young voters are rather cheap to woo. I'd like to see more figures myself but it's nice to see some INITIAL post election number crunching that isn't all "darn-useless-kids-doom-and-gloom".

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ote/index.html

11-10-2004, 03:29 AM	#3 (permalink)
Macheath Junkie Location: Sydney, Australia	I just want to have a bit of a look at your second point. I think "...with record turnout Kerry still lost by 3.5 million popular votes." is a LITTLE misleading considering that, aside from Gore's popular vote win of 2000, it was the closest popular vote since 1976 when the margin was 1,682,790. By contrast, George HW Bush lost the popular vote in 1992 by 5,805,334 votes. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html I don't think the "Rock the vote" type things were an unmitigated failure either. 5 million more young people voted in 2004 than in 2000 and national exit polls indicate 54 percent of these young people voted for Kerry. You have to consider the cost of getting someone to vote. This was a big money election and you have to ask, how much does it cost to get a million young Kerry voters to the polls versus the cost of a million "value voters" for Bush? The linked article suggests that young voters are rather cheap to woo. I'd like to see more figures myself but it's nice to see some INITIAL post election number crunching that isn't all "darn-useless-kids-doom-and-gloom". http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ote/index.html