Youth Voter Turnout Estimates to be Available From CIRCLE Tomorrow
Experts to Offer Youth Vote Analysis of Midterm Election Results On Press Conference Call Briefing, Wed., 10 am ET

Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, Medford, MA – Youth represented 9%-10% of all voters, compared to 12% in 2006, according to the National Election Pool exit poll conducted by Edison Mitofsky Research.

At this time we cannot yet determine whether youth turnout rose, stayed the same, or declined in comparison to the 2006 midterm elections.  Youth share of voters is widely reported in the media but is not a good measure of turnout.  The youth share of voters is strongly influenced by how other groups turn out, whereas youth turnout is a measure of youth participation.

CIRCLE will release an estimate of youth turnout tomorrow based on the youth share of voters, vote tallies reported by the media and youth population estimates obtained from the US Census (see below for call details).

“Youth share of the vote appears to be lower than in recent midterm elections, but that could be because of extraordinarily high turnout among older citizens,” said CIRCLE director Peter Levine. “We caution against drawing the conclusion that youth participation was down this year.”

See our new CIRCLE press release for more details about the exit polls and tomorrow’s briefing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Research Topics, Youth Voting/Political Participation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.