Young people not turning out for mayoral vote

One more note on the demographic breakdown from the 14 days of early voting, adding to something that Otis Sanford wrote about this weekend.

Of the 48,655 who voted early, 39,141 are 45 or older -- so just more than 80 percent of those who have voted were born born in 1964 or before. This would not appear to be good news for Memphis City Schools board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., who has focused on the youth vote.

The Shelby County Election Commission reports that only 4,232 voters under the age of 35 could be bothered to vote early, or 8.7 percent of the vote.

As Alex reported, 62.7 percent of voters were female and 49.8 percent of voters were registered black voters (you can assume some large percentage of those in the "other" category are also black voters; the "other" category is dominated by voters who do not identify race on their registration forms). So the model voter in this election -- female, black and entered adulthood sometime before 1980.

By the way, there was a crossover of around 6,000 people who voted for Memphis mayor and for the Tennessee state senate District 31 primaries. There were only 630 people who voted for state senate but not for Memphis mayor.

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