Virginia: 500,000 new voters under the age of 26

Why Virginia is turning Blue

From the Virginian-Pilot

The pool of 18- to 25-year-olds signing up to vote in this year’s presidential election is growing at twice the rate of all Virginia voters, according state election officials.

The surge in young registrants, which experts attribute to heightened interest in national politics, means that the group of voters 25 and younger in the state has grown 10 percent in the past year, while the growth in the entire voter pool has increased 5 percent, according to the Virginia State Board of Elections.

The young voters make up only a slightly larger portion this year of Virginia’s 4.7 million registered voters – an estimated 11 percent of all voters a year ago and 12 percent today. As of last week, 569,817 registered voters in the commonwealth are under 26 years old.




And yes the article had lots of snippets detailing how Obama is creating the interest and is going to do well but these dellusional Republican toadies are just more interesting. To read the article http://hamptonroads.com/2008/07/more-young-virginians-are-registering-will-they-vote

VA will go blue

Seriously :rofl:

They're all like "He's on the internets, surfing the series of tubes, hangin ten with the virtual youngins. Pretty fly for an old guy huh yungins?" :rofl:

GTFOH ya old geebus!

This tells me Obama could pull off upsets in states like Georgia.

Katrina-displaced Houston-residents are going to help in Harris county.

A strong showing among Hispanic voters will help bring large margins in El Paso & Bexar counties.

Large turnout among African-American voters will help carry Dallas, Harris & Tarrant counties.



Regarding the large urban centers, Kerry only won El Paso & Travis counties. (El Paso & Austin)

So while the new registrants are great (if they vote) -the numbers still favor McCain in Virginia by a comfortable margin.

Georgia and Indiana require about twice that swing- so while it's nice to dream, they're not in play.

If those numbers are in the ball game, not only are Virginia and Indiana in play they are at the moment leaning Obama.

mike kohr

Especially this year- where they've been all over the mark- to the point of being useless.

Looking at the actual results and figuring out how many Kerry voters Obama has to retain (he won't retain them all) plus how many Bush voters he has to convert, along with whatever percentage of new voters that are likely to vote Obama give us a much better gauge of what'll likely happen on election day.

Historically, a 10% swing is huge- unlikely, but not unheard of in a state with demographics like Virgina. A 20% swing in a state like Indiana would require such a massive shift that unless there's an utter and complete meltdown on McCain's side as perceived by ordinary, generally uniformed voters- it's not going to happen.

Wattaya say?

I'd say that it's easy to lose a lot of money in the futures markets.

:shrug:

and at any rate, some of us don't like to bet against the home team. Irrespective of the odds.

If Bush won 55% to 45% and 5% switch to Obama this time then its tied. Add on a half a million voters and Obama wins easily.

My guess is that's not going to happen in Virginia, due to racial and military matters.

Bush - 1,716,959 Kerry - 1,454,742

Thats a difference of under 300,000 votes. If Kerry had 500,000 more people voting for him he would have won by 200,000 votes.

half a million relatively new voters that may have been registered over the last few years.


sorry for the ambiguity

unless those Diebold machines are in Virginia.....

But we got them last Friday when we did our Mock Trial of Karl Rove when he was in town to raise funds for Thelma Drake, who does not represent us in Congress but gets paid to do so.

I always get annoyed when we overstate registration advantage. It leads to those nutty fraud threads, that we should have won by 8% or whatever in every race.

"The young voters make up only a slightly larger portion this year of Virginia’s 4.7 million registered voters – an estimated 11 percent of all voters a year ago and 12 percent today. As of last week, 569,817 registered voters in the commonwealth are under 26 years old."

The total number, period, of registered voters under age 26 in Virginia is roughly 570,000. It certainly hasn't jumped from 70,000 to 570,000 in a year. The article clearly states the percentage has gone from 11% to 12% during that period.

Now let's backtrack to a prior paragraph:

"The surge in young registrants, which experts attribute to heightened interest in national politics, means that the group of voters 25 and younger in the state has grown 10 percent in the past year, while the growth in the entire voter pool has increased 5 percent, according to the Virginia State Board of Elections."

Okay, so there's the numerical reference point. A 10% rise means roughly 52,000, from 518,000 to 570,000. That would be rounding it off. It obviously could be many thousands, or ten thousand -- who knows? -- in either direction.

So the number of new young voters in Virginia is basically 10% what this headline suggests. And that 90% Democratic estimate from someone else in this thread is also wildly off base. God, I wish I could bet some of this stuff, against anything math related from internet posters. My percentage would certainly surpass the daily sports betting grind.

newly registered. Young voters are registering at twice the rate of other voters.


It is half a million voters who are relatively new to the process and at the maximum have participated in a single election.

and Georgia too! As well as California, New York, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. Especially the District of Columbia! Nuthin' but red in DC.

:crazy:

As you suggest, Obama has a lead in VA as we speak. He's definitely flipping more than one red state in November.

Obama got the repub vote out there. My friend, who has racists in his family, said they actually voted for Obama in the primaries because they hated McCain and abhor HRC. I believe in the primaries Obama managed to turn Georgia Blue and got the most votes there.