For all the denunciation of "those damn kids who didn't turnout and lost us the election," there is something about this chart that keeps bugging me. If the under-30 vote have had the same 12% of the midterm electorate since 2006, and the over-60 vote has inched up from 29% to 32% to 37%, then shouldn't we be looking at voters between 30 and 60 for the bust in turnout?
There are a few explanations I can come up with for why this might have been the case.
1. The elephant-in-a-python demographic bulge of Boomers aging from the under-60 to over-60 bracket, swelling the numbers of the over-60 group and deflating the under-60 group by their absence (leaving the 30-60 increasingly populated by the baby bust years of Gen X).
2. Somehow middle aged voters are more likely to just give up on the whole thing? I got nothing, but you can fill in your pet theory here.
People who know something about statistics, am I totally wrong here? It seems to me that the disproportionate dip in voting logically cannot have come out of the youth vote, even though they turned out at the lowest level, because they hit the same % of the electorate. Explaining why that happened may be worth looking into, for Democrats concerned with how our party has been getting wiped out most midterm off-elections due to turnout.
Granted, finding a way to boost youth turnout would help to dampen that see-saw pattern, but that's a different conversation, IMO.
Thoughts?