The Kids are Still Alright

Filed a piece on the youth vote last night for Morphizm pals WireTap/Alternet, which focused on everyone's favorite demographic -- the kids! -- and analyzed their astouding levels of participation and commitment in the 2006 midterms. The data is seriously telling, and the analysis of that data leaves one without too much in the way of illusion. Which is another way of saying that those who continue to blather on about how the center took this election can't read numbers worth a damn and have been puffing too long on the crack pipe called wishful thinking. Sift this!

The Kids are Right
"The youth turnout rate -- which started at 24 percent -- will probably rise after scandals dissipate or are probed to satisfaction. In 36 precincts heavy with youth voters, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a highly respected youth voter clearinghouse and research organization, voter turnout was six times the national average. That's called walking the walk. Add it up, as the Violent Femmes once screamed, and you have change blowing in the wind and everyone smelling it at the same time. After all, in two years, these voters will be older and even more experienced, and they're not likely to change their political tune, and not simply because thousands of them may still be in Iraq, occupying another country for the sake of an American regime's stubborn ignorance. High school and college students, who have to do homework from hell to get ahead these days, will remember well enough that former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith claimed the president didn't even know there were two major sects of Islam at work in Iraq, just months before the President ordered troops to bomb the life, liberty and happiness out of it. Considering the hideous price tag, in lives and dollars, it's hard for people who actually do homework to stomach the fact that their president cannot, even as he sends them off to die...."
READ THE REST HERE

Like it or not, progressives are beginning to take over the government, and it will only be a matter of years -- barring something unforseen like, oh, another war? -- before they are a political majority in the country. What the entire United States, not just us treehuggers, has realized is that years of reactionary social and policy measures implemented by the so-called Republican majority has taken us nowhere but backwards. So far, in fact, that there is no more room to move at all, only inch along the massive wall that the Repubs have tried to build around the country and their leaking ideology.

But the youth vote's power does not stop there. Republican and Democratic pollsters and strategists have agreed, following the midterm ass-kicking, that neither of them can win a lick without winning the youth vote. As the youth vote goes, especially when they vote in these numbers, so goes the country. Why? Because they're only getting older, and according to the data, 75 percent of voters who stick with one party over the course of three elections usually end up staying with that party for life. Ironies of ironies, considering the Republicans consider themselves the pro-life party.

Without the youth vote in hand, they were taken off of life support in the 2006 midterms. And so will the Democrats, should they choose to look the gift this of remarkably organized, relentlessly active demographic in the mouth and fail to accomplish the very things they were put back into power to accomplish. I've always talked mad trash against both parties, so don't expect me to get cuddly with the Democrats until they show me what they can, or are willing, to do. I would suggest everyone else do the same.