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Bloomberg’s Catherine Dodge writes today that “the thrill is gone” for young voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008:

Indiana University professor Gerald Wright opened his class on congressional elections by asking students if they saw the previous night’s school-sponsored U.S. House candidate debate a few blocks from campus.

Among almost 60 students, three hands went up.

“Most students don’t care about elections in general,” 20-year-old sophomore Melody Mostow said after the class last week. “In most midterm elections, there’s not that central person for us to rally around.”

Yeah, maybe. But you know what? I wouldn’t have watched either. The U.S. Congress is effectively a parliamentary body these days, and it matters only slightly who its actual individual members are. A few extreme cases aside, all that matters is what party the candidates belong to. No one needs to listen to a debate to figure that out.

In any case, I’m willing to bet a million dollars — no, make it a billion — that young voters will turn out this year in roughly the same numbers that they always turn out for midterm elections. The chart on the right from the good folks at CIRCLE shows that youth turnout was up a bit from historical lows in 2006, but the broader trend is that turnout in general has gone steadily down, and a youth turnout rate of 20-22% this year would be entirely average. And that’s pretty much what I expect it to be. No thrill needs to be gone to explain this.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

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