Choose Your Own The Who Reference

A new Democracy Corps survey indicates that young people (i.e., those aged 18-29) hate the Republicans. Or, at least, the GOP is massively unpopular. Some non-obvious things I gleaned from the report:

• White young people like the GOP just fine; the GOP has a two point advantage. The issue is that black and hispanic youth loathe Republicans and the younger demographic has disproportionately few non-Hispanic whites.
• Democrats have an edge among college graduates, but it's small at +6 compared to the advantage with less educated groups.
• Young people don't really like John Edwards. He gets a negative six net rating, similar to John McCain (negative eight), but way worse than Clinton (+10), Giuliani (+11), or Obama (+18)

When you think it through, none of that is actually all that surprising, but it's worth keeping in mind. The internet features a lot of young, college educated white male liberals (oftentimes big John Edwards fans!) and it is true that young people are pretty liberal these days. Nevertheless, it's not true that the young college educated white male liberals of the blogosphere are typical of the youth cohort. The Democratic leanings of young people are driven by giant advantages among women (+28), people with no college education (+28), Hispanics (+42), and blacks (+76). Your typical twentysomething white male college graduate seems, just like a typical thirtysomething (or fourtysomething, or...) white male college graduate to be a Republican.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/07/choose-your-own-the-who-reference/43286/