Numbers
: Below, I joined in the Stern-v-Seipp pissing match over the citizenship of Howard’s audience (defending my people against the snobbery Seipp expressed in the very nichey National Review, of course). In the comments, Eric Barrett made some wonderful calculations:
How about some numbers?
36% of voters aged 18-24 vote. This is the lowest percentage of any eligible age group. I’ll be conservative and use this number for the entirety of Stern’s listeners, even though a large percentage is surely over the age of 24.
I’ve no idea what the average age range of National Review readers is, but let’s be conservative and pick 55-64, which has the second highest voting rate of any age group, at 70%. (The highest is 65-74, but that seems a bit old to me. In any case, they only vote at a rate of 72%.)
Now, given the numbers Mr. Jarvis posted above, and disregarding invective rhetoric about the intelligence of Stern fans, this means that approximately 3,000,000 Stern fans will vote. If only 5% (my assumption) are former Bush-committed voters influenced by Stern, that’s 153,000 who will vote against Bush in the election who would not have otherwise. That’s the size of the entire National Review readership!
But even if my assumption above is completely bogus, we’re talking 3,000,000 voting Stern listeners to 112,000 voting NR readers. And (warning: another assumption of mine here) given the political spectrum of NR is fairly fixed (i.e. much of it is “preaching to the converted”), whereas Stern has fans all across the political spectrum, the NR has even less influence relative to Stern.
All figures taken from the US Census Bureau, “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2000” (Adobe PDF, page 6, table B).
Do not underestimate the power of the Stern demographic, damnit. If you do — if you snear that “they” don’t vote or “they” are stupid or “they” don’t care — then you’re just exposing yourself to be a snob. And I hate snobs.
