Green Hampshire, Cloud Hampshire

Is it the plague? (4.00 / 1)

Have a bunch of Democrats passed on since the November election?  I can't think of any other explanation as to why these polling outfits are not sampling the Democrats in accordance with the post election registration numbers.  



"When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on."  Franklin D. Roosevelt    

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by: Kathy Sullivan 2 @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 19:27:10 PM CDT

H1N1? n/t (4.00 / 1)

birch, finch, beech

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by: Dean Barker @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 19:33:17 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Despite the best efforts of the late Sonny Bono (4.00 / 6)

I'm pretty sure that Vergil and Homer are both in the public domain by now.

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by: elwood @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 19:28:04 PM CDT

Stop the young voter misinfo! (4.00 / 3)

Point of clarification:

Youth voter turnout in New Hampshire is traditionally STRONG.

New Hampshire had a 62% youth voter turnout (see page 7) in the 2008 elections - the 4th highest rate in the nation among citizens aged 30 and younger. That is up from 59% in 2004 and 46% in 2000. Over 84,000 young people voted in the NH Primary, accounting for a higher percentage of the N.H. electorate (16%) than senior citizens. NH's young people vote, they vote Democratic, and they vote at a higher rate than 47 other states.

This meme of "the traditionally poor showing of younger voters" in New Hampshire is so wrong that it belongs in a Cloud Hampshire poll, but not here in Blue Hampshire. Back in the 80's that line of thinking may have been true, but not now ... not by a long shot.

So in terms of polling, samples, etc., the key issue is not that NH youth do not vote - for the past decade they have in huge #s - it's that New Hampshire is losing its youth population at an alarming rate. Our state saw its number of people aged 30-35 drop by an astonishing 12% between 2000 and 2006 alone. More young people vote in NH than just about anywhere, it's just that every year there are less of us.

The young voter makes us Blue Hampshire, folks, even as our state is rapidly aging into Grey Hampshire.

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by: Garth Corriveau @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:05:58 PM CDT

Excellent! (0.00 / 0)

I stand corrected.

But to my question, and given the young adult migration you mention: does a mean sample age of 57.9 sound wrong, or on target? Anyway to figure it out?

birch, finch, beech

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by: Dean Barker @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:12:09 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

a first stab (0.00 / 0)

CAVEAT EMPTOR

Using 2008 GE exit poll data from here, and treating 65+ as being centered at 75 (a major SWAG!), I think the mean voter age was 47.24.

Treating ages as being evenly distributed within their cohorts, I think the median voter age was 47.71, but I'm not sure I'm really that clever.

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by: Mormo @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:32:43 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

ps (0.00 / 0)

We can be sure the 08 GE median voter age was on the lower end of the 45-64 cohort, assuming the exit poll is reliable, since 44% of voters were in the two younger cohorts...it's not a very long way to 50% from 44%.

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by: Mormo @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:34:30 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

The age in six groups (0.00 / 0)

shows 55% of the voters between 18 and 49. So the median is no higher than 49, and the mean likely to be in that range as well. (A lot of nonagenarians could skew the mean upwards, but that's not what I see at the polls.)

So the Dartmouth poll seems to skew old.

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by: elwood @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:40:53 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

and now (0.00 / 0)

Damn, they have six-category age as well. New math follows.

I get median voter at 46.95.

The mean voter age, now treating 65+ as 78, is 47.32.

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by: Mormo @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:43:01 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Intuuitiely (4.00 / 1)

the mean should be higher, right? It's sensitive to the difference between a 92 and 98 yr old voter, but the median isn't. (Also, there are by definition no low outliers, given the 18 voting age.)

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by: Mormo @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:48:15 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Let's see... (4.00 / 1)

100 spread evenly from 20 to 30, 100 spread evenly from 30 to 40. Md = 30, Mn = 30 ((25 + 35) /2).

Til the younguns all down to 20, keep the oldsters spread out. Md = 30, Mn = 27.5 ((20 + 35) / 2).

So we can have old outliers - but we can also have clumps at either end. And perhaps its clumpier in the youngest group - since there's a big voter drive.

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by: elwood @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:59:05 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

point taken (0.00 / 0)

I'll just have to point at the graphs here and wave my hands about the low turnout of the very young voters.

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by: Mormo @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 21:20:41 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Yeah (0.00 / 0)

That's not a NH graph. Our young voters vote.

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by: Garth Corriveau @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 22:23:27 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

I know (0.00 / 0)

And indeed I'm glad we do! All I'm trying to get at is that it seems unlikely that there's a clump of 18-yr-old voters dragging the mean voting age down...if anything, they're somewhat less likely to vote than, say 24-yr-olds, yea, even in Blue Hampshire. It's quite true that the gap between 18-29 and 30+ turnout places NH at the sixth smallest gap in the nation (according to the PDF you linked) for comparative turnout, over-30s still vote in higher percentages than under-30s by 11.7 percentage points.

Also, I'm skeptical of their DC numbers. Another analysis here shows DC turnout at around 60%, not 76%. (I only mention this because that would move NH up a slot in turnout and young voter turnout.)

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by: Mormo @ Wed May 13, 2009 at 08:07:25 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

Well, what if they vote - (0.00 / 0)

but in another state, after they leave NH to start a career?

We could have a bubble at 18-22 just because college graduates leave the state. The twenties population itself may be frontloaded in NH.

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by: elwood @ Wed May 13, 2009 at 18:07:45 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

39.8 (0.00 / 0)

According to a May 9, 2008 article in NHBR, the US Census has NH's median age at 39.8 (corroborated by WikiAnswers). That's way up there nationally - good for 5th highest in the nation - but obviously way short of Green Hampshire's 57.9 and 56 respectively. My best educated guess is that the median N.H. voter's age likely is in the early-to-mid-40's, not the late 50's.

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by: Garth Corriveau @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:38:06 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Correction - (4.00 / 1)

That's the median of the population. You are comparing it to the median of the voters.

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by: elwood @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:42:11 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Here are some of the number on 2008 youth turnout in the Granite State (4.00 / 1)

http://www.civicyouth.org/PopU...

Primary numbers on the youth vote:
http://www.civicyouth.org/PopU...

http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_...

It is clear that our young people are more engaged than ever. This generation of young voters turn out in much, much bigger numbers than their parents or grandparents before them did at this age.

The median age of a voter in Dartmouth's poll seems very, very high to me.

Young Dems Keep the Granite State Blue

Bresler for Emperor

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by: Blue Granite @ Wed May 13, 2009 at 08:35:38 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

interesting (0.00 / 0)

The sample is very small (n=403) and uweighted, but the 2010 Sen head-to-head numbers seem more reasonable than many, with lots and lots of undecided voters this far out (in an open-seat race, mind).

I would also be interested in the median and mean voter age in NH. There's a well-known concern about getting enough young voters into polling samples to being with, and the cell-phone-only issue is only worsening that. (From my reading, cell-phone-onlies aren't very different from their age cohorts in general, so you can weight responses by age to correct to at least some degree, but Selzer at least did find significant differences and there's the added problem of ever-shrinking young voter subsamples. If you only reach ten 18-29 voters and you weight them up to 100 to match the age demographics, you amplify the noise along with the signal.)

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by: Mormo @ Tue May 12, 2009 at 20:20:06 PM CDT