Friday, December 4, 2009
City Increase in Younger Voters in Mayor's Race
Posted by Eli Sanders on Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 3:59 PM
The Stranger requested a bunch of data from King County Elections in order to figure out what the heck happened in November, and while we're still playing around with what we received, our first cut at the data shows a jump in participation by younger voters in the 2009 mayor's race (as compared to the 2005 mayor's race).
Click on the chart to enlarge it. Voter age is across the bottom, and total votes cast runs up the left side:
- The Stranger
Granted, almost all age groups showed increased participation in 2009 over 2005. That's most likely because this was a more exciting election (Mallahan vs. McGinn, etc.) than the election four years ago (Nickels vs. Runte, etc).
However, those supposedly unreliable younger voters (which we're defining for now as voters aged 18 to 35) increased their participation more significantly than the next cohort of voters (aged 36 to 53).
And, when compared to the always-reliable older voters (aged 54 to 71), younger voters increased their participation by close to the same amount.
Full chart—comparing voter turnout for all age groups of Seattle voters in 2005 and 2009—is below. More charts and data as we (meaning, mainly, The Stranger's Nat Irons) crunch more numbers.
- The Stranger
In pie chart form here.
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2
That said, it shows that turnout of all voters is why McGinn won, instead of the traditional strategery of focus on 3/4 voters that Mallahamsters did.
Please revise the graphs to represent # of votes cast per # of registered voters in each age group. That will present a clearer picture and remove demographic shifts between 05 and 09 from the picture.
Love,
me
5
@3 is right - your raw numbers don't control for potential changes in voter population sizes for each age class.
9
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(And then things like the weird little peaks of 58 & 35 year olds in 2005 would line up nicely with the corresponding spikes in the 2009 data at 62 & 39, respectively.)
13
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