Bush Polling Poorly With Independents, Youth

If you believe these polls. Our mentor for "The Emerging Democratic Majority" and a man who definitely believes in polls, Ruy Teixeira (pronounced ta-SHAR-a), has interesting polling to discuss about Bush's declining numbers among independent voters here.

Teixeira also posted numbers here alleging to show declining support for Bush among 18-29 year-olds, with this somewhat ominous admission masquerading as hope: "the higher youth turnout is in November, the better for the Democrats." The higher the turnout, there's the rub. (And that would have been one of the potentially brilliant features of a Howard Dean campaign ... heightened turnout among this age group.) But the 20-somethings that we see are taking their cues for hip disengagement from Jon Stewart, among others, and wearing T-shirts that brag, "Voting is for OLD PEOPLE." Teixeira says, "The GOP's best bet here is that old standby youth apathy. Let's hope they're unpleasantly surprised this November." Indeed, we'll hope. We'll be doing much more than that, as a matter of fact, with the student body at Appalachian State University ... the single largest potential voting bloc in Watauga County. But they quite simply have not shown any particular interest in being a part of this democracy since Harvey Gantt lost to Jesse Helms in 1990.