Young voters and everybody else

Following a suggestion of Hober Short, I replotted the voting-by-age data with time on the x-axis. I also took this opportunity to go back to 1988 (the earliest for which I could effortlessly pull exit poll data off the web). Here’s what happened:

ages3.png

Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 did well among young voters–like Barack Obama, he was a young Democrat facing older Republican opponents–but not so well as Obama in 2008.

As in many political settings, the largest gains in the graph come from incorporating additional data–in this case, the comparison of 2008 with earlier years, the comparison on young voters with those of other ages, and the comparison of the three other age groups with each other (with the lack of variation in this last comparison being a motivation to focus on trends among young voters in particular).

3 thoughts on “Young voters and everybody else

  1. Could you redo this graph in color?

    There are enough intersection that it is imposible to track the top three age groups.

    Thanks, and thanks for all the interesting stuff every week!

  2. Pingback: Bush And The Youth Vote… « In One Ear… Out the Other

  3. Would it be possible to see this graph with a third variable, proportion of each age group the the given year’s election. I would be interesting to see where an age group voted as well as how much of the total vote was produced by the given age group.

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