But turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was at its highest level in more than a decade, report says

The Oakland Tribune
November 13, 2004
By Monica Mehta and Nick Miroff, CORRESPONDENTS

OAKLAND -- Berkeley resident Maya Trabin, 24, was so eager to oust President Bush, she struck out for Colorado two months before the election. Trabin put in long hours canvassing neighborhoods and college campuses to register young voters, hoping to swing the state for John Kerry. But when Kerry was defeated on Election Day, Trabin spent the next week in her pajamas.

"I was in total shock," she said. Now she's back home and, like many young Kerry supporters who staked their hearts and hopes on the 2004 election, she has mixed feelings about what happened.

"The experience was amazing," Trabin said. "But the outcome was so terribly depressing."

While Trabin's political involvement defied conventional wisdom about youth voter apathy, the role of 18- to 24-year-olds in the election remains in dispute. Many analysts were quick to say low turnout among the young had a hand in Kerry's defeat, despite the glitzy get-out-the-vote efforts of celebrities such as Eminem, P. Diddy and the "Vote or Die" campaign. But a new report by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement found youth voter turnout was at its highest level in more than a decade.

In addition, the 18-to-24 set demonstrated the strongest support for Kerry -- 56 percent supported the Democratic candidate, compared with 48 percent of voters overall. This year's election saw a 6 percent jump in voters ages 18 to 24 compared with 2000 -- 36.5 percent to 42.3 percent of all eligible voters in this age group -- based on exit polls conducted by Edison Mitofsky and vote tallies from the Associated Press. Still, that number was less than the nearly 60 percent of all eligible voters who went to the polls.

Connie Flanagan, professor of youth civic development at Pennsylvania State University, said turnout has always been lower among youth. "As you get older, you get more engaged in why it's important to vote," she said. "They are not rooted enough in the community to know about the connection between what is happening to them and what's happening in government."

Flanagan said critics should pay more attention to the 6 percent increase in turnout among these young voters. "This election engendered far more interest among the college-age population," Flanagan said. "A war where young people are fighting definitely comes close to home."

Eighteen-year-old San Francisco resident Rolando Casanas said his opposition to the war in Iraq was the main reason he voted. But among his friends, he was the only voter. "They didn't really care," he said. "They didn't think their vote mattered."

But Asra Chatham, another first-time voter, took away an entirely different political lesson. Chatham, 20, a junior at Mills College, went on a road trip with the Femme Dems, a Democratic student group, to mobilize voters in Reno, Nev.

"It was so exciting," she said, "it was all new to me." Though Kerry lost, Chatham said she wasn't discouraged by the experience and felt more politically engaged than ever after the election.

"Just because it doesn't come out the way you want it to doesn't mean that you should stop working for change or give up," Chatham said, adding, "maybe next time."

Next time is now for 21-year-old Andrea Irvin, president of the Berkeley College Republicans, who saw her party's voter mobilization efforts pay off. She said analysts overestimated the number of young people who would go for Kerry.

"A lot more young people voted for Bush than expected because the people MTV is appealing to are not people who voted in this election," she said. "Just because we're youth that doesn't automatically mean we're voting Democrat or liberal."

Irvin credits Bush's win to his ability to connect with Americans of all ages. "Bush did a very good job of emphasizing issues now affecting young people -- education, taxes, less government and more freedom."

For young Democrats like Trabin, Kerry's loss was offset by her interactions with other politically active young people who went to Colorado.

"I don't regret it. In the end it was the personal, one-on-one conversations that were really important and seeing that people were excited and that they cared."

Trabin said she wouldn't be wasting any more time moping around in her sleepwear. "I'm not sick of politics at all. If anything, it's the opposite. I'm more involved in the process than ever."

Monica Mehta and Nick Miroff are students at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.