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Coakley in free fall? Young voters for Scott Brown?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
01/18/10 5:45 PM EST
Politico has commissioned another poll from Insider Advantage on tomorrow’s Massachusetts Senate election. It shows Brown ahead 52%-43% and, amazingly, leading among voters under 30 by a 61%-30% margin. By way of contrast, the 2008 exit poll showed 18-29s in Massachusetts voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a 78%-20% margin. I have not heard whether there will be an exit poll on tomorrow’s vote. The Insider Advantage poll may have the numbers wrong; margins of error for subsamples are larger than margins of error for the entire poll, and the Insider Advantage poll shows seniors (65+) evenly divided. The exit poll doesn’t show numbers for them, but by interpolation it has them going about 60%-40% for Obama—which would indicate a much smaller Democratic dropoff among them than among young voters. Possible explanation: they’re the remnant of the old Massachusetts electorate in which almost all Catholics voted Democratic and almost all Protestants voted Republican, and they’re still generally voting the way they’ve done all these years. For young Massachusetts voters, this theory would go on, that old sectarian divide is history long forgotten, and they’re more willing to switch their votes in response to issues and candidates (as is generally true of younger voters).
Just a theory. But if I were running the Republican party, I would want to know whether Scott Brown has made such inroads among young voters, and if so how. Nationally Obama carried voters under 30 by 66%-32% but voters over 30 by only 50%-49%. If that 66%-32% is as ephemeral as this poll suggests, that’s very big political news
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