Never Let The Data Get In Your Way

I saw the headline "Fewer Young Voters Identifying as Democrats" sprawled across the Huffington Post, and clicked on the article. Here is that article. And I scrolled down, reading the discussion of how fewer and fewer college-age voters were favoring the Democrats, presumably because of the economy. But look at the graph. There was a dramatic plunge in youth Democratic identification... between June of 2008 and late last year. Since then, the Democratic advantage among the young has rebounded considerably, by maybe five to ten net points. I saw a story about falling Dem. youth advantage several months ago, when the original plunge occurred. But it makes no sense to have this article now: if they were being honest, they'd say that the Democrats have gotten a bit of their act together with the young. And note that among the non-young, i.e. pre-1981 births, the Republicans have taken an advantage for the first time all decade (though pre-1981 voters made up a smaller proportion earlier in the decade), so the Democrats have been doing really great among the young relative to their performance among the not young. So they're just blithely pushing their narrative, despite the fact that the evidence directly contradicts it. Fail, New York Times.