Greenberg Quinlan Rosner | News

Washington, DC. Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner have completed a comprehensive and multi-modal survey of America’s youth ages 18-29. This major, multi-mode survey of America’s young people shows young people profoundly alienated from the Republican Party and poised to deliver a significant majority to the Democratic nominee for President in 2008. Involving a combination of land-line telephone survey, cell-phone interviews and web research, surveyors overcame the inherent difficulties and biases of researching this population.The survey finds young people profoundly alienated from the Republican party and its perceived values. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lead Rudy Giuliani—the most acceptable of the Republican offerings among youth—by significant margins. The President’s standing is substantially worse, to the degree that is possible, than we find in the broader electorate. Moreover, the disconnect we see between the Republicans and our nation’s youth runs so deep, that it likely will not only outlive the Bush administration, but potentially haunt the Republicans for many years to come.

This survey involved 1,017 young people, including 510 telephone interviews, 407 web surveys and 100 cell phone interviews. The survey was conducted between May 29 and June 19, 2007.

Here’s a novelty: profoundly alienated youth. In my day, you indicated your profound alienation by wearing black clothing, doing bizarre and otherworldly things to your hair and skin, and listening to Black Flag and X.

Well, this research item is just dandy — although I suspect that a fair number of College Republicans are pulling this to pieces and stomping on the bits. I wonder how many pages of MySpace and Facebook goo the researchers slogged through in order to reach potential respondents?

Sadly, I fear that their sample wasn’t as representative as they’d hoped, just because it’s summer and a lot of the “youth” are off traveling, working summer jobs, and so on. At about the time of the survey, a lot of college-age youth were busy with finals and masters’ theses and whatnot. This is the same group of people who’ll probably receive some “welcome new voter letters” from the Republican Party in August 2008 marked “do not forward…” that’ll get stamped “RETURN TO SENDER.” And their names will end up on “voter fraud challenge lists” for the November election, unless somebody slaps another consent decree on the GOP.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast (whose very name is fightin’ words in some quarters, I believe) was on PBS’ NOW the other night with a pretty damning report on voter caging – how it’s done, and how it might have been used in 2004. Personally, I think a less refined version was used in 2000 too, which scared the beJebus out of the GOP because they lost the popular vote and only won on the anachronistic technicality that is the Electoral College (and because the Supreme Court had had enough of hanging chats and recounts in Florida). Also, there’s a bit with former New Mexico AG Iglesias, testifying before Congress and interviewing that he believed he was being manipulated into investigating baseless “voter fraud” and “corrupt Democratic officials” cases purely for political ends, and he was fired for finding no basis for them and discontinuing the investigations. He didn’t play ball, so they sidelined him. Bastids.

Is there any scandal out there that ISN’T somehow tied to the Justice Department AG firings?

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[tags]Greg Palast, voter caging, profoundly alienated[/tags]