Youth Suck (Says my friend...)

The Associated Press reports:

This was not the breakout year for young voters that some had anticipated.

Fewer than one in 10 voters Tuesday were 18 to 24, about the same proportion of the electorate as in 2000, exit polls indicated. Still, with voter turnout expected to be higher overall, more young people appeared to have come out.

A vigorous push on college campuses by both parties and national mobilization drives had raised expectations that 2004 would be the year of the youth vote.

Exit polls indicated that young people who did vote were strongly supporting Democrat John Kerry over President Bush, while they were evenly split between Bush and Democrat Al Gore four years ago.

Or, as a friend put it in the header of his email, "Youth Suck."

I wouldn't go that far, but the numbers are not good. 18-29 voted at the same rate as 2000, while 30-44 was actually down.

The key: it has to be about issues, not just t-shirts or slogans.

In the post-mortem analysis, I'd like to see what messaging-only groups like Citizen Change were able to accomplish versus ones that laid out a political agenda for voters, like the League's IndyVoter.org.