About That Youth Vote: Worries For Dems?

A number of observers have been predicting that, for a number of reasons, the youth vote--which tends to be fairly heavily Dem--may be significantly lower this election. The two usual reasons cited have been that 1) many students aren't at their colleges and are thus more difficult to locate and talk into voting, and 2) a general lack of enthusiasm for Biden.

Tonight RedState has two articles that confirm that trends in early voting do, indeed, have Dems worried.

Shipwreckedcrew writes in Early Absentee Ballot Voting in Some States Has Some Concerns for Democrats, quoting the United States Election Project:

But one issue of concern that is reflected in the early absentee numbers is the failure of young voters to cast their ballots early as projected.  This is a factor that has happened in earlier elections, and it portends difficulty for Democrat candidates when all the votes are counted.

Many of you follow me because I am ahead of the curve on voting trends. I will make this prediction, which is easy to make since it is already evident in this year’s data, just as it was in prior years’ data:

I predict in the coming weeks the Democratic narrative will change from euphoria over the apparent large leads in early voting to concern that a disproportionately large number of younger voters have yet to return their mail ballots.”

He makes this as a generalized prediction, but he is looking specifically at ballot return numbers in North Carolina, where 46% of voters over age 65 who requested an absentee ballot have already returned them, but only 22% of voters under age 25 have done the same thing.

But North Carolina is a bit of a “bellwether” state on the subject because they have been accepting absentee ballots for 5 weeks already, so the sample size of the returns is significant.

Nick Arama seconds that view in Here Are the Metrics That Show Trump Has a Lock on the Election:

Mainstream media have been trumpeted a lot of the polls being for Joe Biden.

We’ve pointed out the problems of some of those polls and how there are the other polls, like the Democracy Institute poll, that find President Donald Trump ahead because they’re measuring likely voters not registered voters and they aren’t oversampling Democrats. Most are also not measuring things like the shy Trump voter or that the youth vote is again unlikely to come out in greater numbers.

But what’s missing in a lot of the discourse is that the measures apart from MSM national polls by which you judge whether a president will be reelected are all for Trump.

First there’s no indication of a youth voter surge, that’s bad for the Democrats who poll much higher with the young that other age groups.

Both articles are worth a further reading, beyond these excerpts.