October 24, 2007 7:32 AM

The Elusive -- But Not Imaginery -- Youth Vote

Myth #1: Youth Don't Vote.

We hear it so often that we assume it to be true. Event when the numbers suggest otherwise, many reporters cling to this conventional lack-of-wisdom. So it's refreshing when a paper runs a story that gets it right:

Jon Tester couldn't have done it without the kids. The Montana Democrat with the unfashionable flattop now boasts cool digs in the U.S. Senate, thanks to a surge in voting among 18-to-29-year-olds that lifted him over Republican incumbent Conrad Burns in 2006. Four years earlier, the cohort composed just 8 percent of Montana's vote. Last year, that number jumped to 17 percent.

That this article leads with Tester's victory is a testimony to the impact of the youth vote. The article is right: it can be complicated to turn out youth and it can require new techniques (the article talks about Facebook and Myspace, as well as Mitt Romney's fundraising efforts which allow college students to keep 10% of what they raise).

But "elusive" is different from "ineffective" which many people fall back to when discussing young voters.

That's why blogs like Future Majority are important for setting the record straight; and why Working Assets invests in ideas like our Voter Registration Widget, which makes it easy for any website to help people get registered.