CIRCLE released our analysis today of the Census Department’s 2006 voting survey. (The data were released yesterday.) We found that the turnout of young people rose to 25.5%–a low rate, admittedly, but a nice rise compared to 2002. It was also the second consecutive increase. The trend is especially impressive because turnout of the whole population hardly increased at all in 2006. The boost appears to be a youth phenomenon, caused either by the Millennials’ political consciousness or by deliberate youth turnout operations–or both.

On a personal note, I’m relieved that the estimate we released on the day after the election, based on exit polls and accompanied by lots of caveats about the margin of error, turned out to be very close, even slightly conservative.

Meanwhile, I’m helping to run a conference for “emerging scholars” who study service-learning. Each emerging scholar–a graduate student or a junior professor–presents a paper and is assigned senior mentors who are scholars or advocates. This is a deliberate effort to strengthen and diversify the next generation of scholars who study a form of education that appears, at the least, to be highly promising.