Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic wrote of The GOP Generational Time Bomb and created this very telling chart:

Well, despite the fact that Marc Ambinder gets it, there are still many that are blind to the youth vote and seem to find it a personal mission to ignore or discount all of the research and evidence that has been done over the last few years.

Cassy Fiano of Wizbang flat-out mocks the youth vote in a response to the Washington Post article that makes the statement that the youth vote will matter in 2008. Here is Cassy’s thoughts about the civic reawakening of the Millennial generation:

A civic reawakening? Were 20-year-olds “awake” to politics before and somehow “fell asleep”? Um… ok. And, you know, there’s the teensy problem of this poll being conducted with MTV’s help, which automatically dampens the prospect of it becoming a reality.

Look, if “young people” vote, then that’s fantastic. If they don’t, then oh well. They aren’t going to make or break elections, no matter how much the media fawns over them. Every election season its the same old song and dance, and it ain’t a different tune this time around.

It’s not just Cassy Fiano that gets it wrong. Don Surber takes on Marc Ambinder’s piece referenced above. In his commentary, with the cliche title Young People Don’t Vote, he gets it so wrong that the Darwin Awards should make an exception and “honor” a living person.

But young people are a waste of time and energy when it comes to voting. They are not where the voters are.

Voters over time tend to grow more conservative. The percentage of young voters who were Republican was at its nadir in 1952. But Republican Ike Eisenhower was elected president. See Pew Research.

In 2000, Dems held an 8-point advantage in this group and still lost the presidency (Al Gore’s plurality was measured in tenths of a point).

In 2004, Democrats increased that lead to 11 points. Bush won by 3 points.

If there are long-term effects, how did Republican Richard Nixon get elected 16 years after that 1952 nadir — and President Reagan re-elected 16 years after that — and President Bush 16 years after that? Those young Democrats became Middle Aged Independents and then Old Republicans.

Ambinder said it is a ticking bomb. Oh there’s a bomb in that post all right, but I don’t think it is on the Republicans.

The PEW Research source he uses, could that be something I missed that shows young people becoming more conservative as they get older? Oh no, it’s the research that Ambinder covered that shows young voters increasingly identifying as Democrats. Not the best supporting document I would think.

Here are the fallacies that these critics of the youth vote seem overly fond of:

1. Young people don’t vote, so it doesn’t matter if they identify as Democrats. Even if we accepted the untrue statement that young people don’t vote, they do eventually grow up, this isn’t Peter Pan. Since research in fact has shown that party identification for the most part stays consistent throughout life, it still should be troubling to conservatives.
2. The silly kids are Democrats now that they are young and don’t know any better, but they’ll grow out of it. Research says otherwise my conservative friends.
3. Not enough young people will vote to affect the 2008 election, since Gore and Kerry didn’t win with the youth vote. Have you not heard of a trend line? Surber actually shows the youth vote increasing from 2000 to 2004, he should know better. With elections as close as they are, as well as the examples of Democratic candidates in 2006 that did win because of the youth vote, I don’t know how they can ignore it.

Though as frustrated as I get sometimes reading this nonsense, there is a silver lining. As long as conservatives completely write off the youth vote as unimportant and believe that the ghost of Ronald Reagan will personally visit each young person as they get older and magically turn them into Republicans, Democrats have an unobstructed field. So conservatives, by all means, keep it up. The youth vote doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it.