That would seem statistically impossible for 90% to be men.

the fact that you are talking about specific age cohorts, while the numbers quoted could include everyone eligible to vote...especially if those new voters came from the 18-30 age range.

Could be apples and oranges...

Dems went from -11 to +3 among men, and from +3 to +12 among women.  If there are equal numbers of men and women in the electorate, 61% of the Dems' new voters would be men.  But since women outnumber men, the percentage is a little lower.  (Not worth crunching the numbers to find out whether it's really 59% or 60% or what.)

As of 2005 (the most recent year we've got the numbers for), only 1/6 of American households had income >100K.  So let's divide the electorate into sextiles, rather than quintiles, by income.  If 70% of the Dems' gains came from the top sextile, that means that 6% of their gains, more or less, came from each of the lower five sextiles - which means that the Dems's message was about 12 times as effective in reaching voters in the top sixth, economically, as it was in reaching the voters in the lower 5/6.

Excuse me, but that's just plain not possible.  Forget about it.

You can't compare 2004 to 2006 unless you correct for the overall smaller turnout in an off-year election.  The smaller turnout is more heavily skewed to higher incomes.

Comparing election results four years apart, I believe that Democratic gains were disproportionately in lower income and rural areas.  I'm sorry to toot my own horn, but I summarize some evidence in my new Dissent article:

Rural and blue-collar voters swung toward Democrats, most notably in the economically distressed belt stretching from upstate New York to Indiana. The party also picked up House seats in Kansas, Iowa, and western North Carolina.

From 2000 to 2004, George W. Bush gained more votes in the affluent coastal belt from southwestern Connecticut to northern Delaware than almost anywhere else. Similar phenomena appear in the 2006 returns, with Republicans holding contested House seats in upscale suburbs that had been leaning Democratic. Districts that bucked the Democratic tide contain the hedge fund havens of Greenwich and Stamford in Connecticut, the home of Microsoft outside Seattle, and some of Chicago’s wealthiest suburbs. In the strongly Democratic state of Maryland, Republican governor Bob Ehrlich improved on his 2002 performance in many affluent suburban precincts of Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties while running 10 percent behind his previous score in heavily blue-collar Baltimore County.

... the report was produced by Third Way. Third Way has long argued that Democrats need to appeal more to white, male, rural and upper-middle class voters. Is it any wonder that they produced a report showing that when Democrats won, they did just that? As Chris Cilizza writes:
Read any survey sponsored by an interest group with something of a jaundiced eye. Third Way is a centrist Democratic group that advocates policies aimed at growing the party beyond its traditional liberal base. As such, it's not terribly surprising that this study suggests potential for luring more votes from voter groups outside the normal Democratic constituency.

DIdn't Howard Dean say something about appealing to these guys without compromising our progressive principles? We know the rightwingers, DLC, Third Way et al will try to frame white men out of the traditonal liberal (progressive) base, but we shouldn't help them.

Because middle aged white men have been such an underrepresented voice in the Democratic Party.

Quite aside from any statistical fragility,  that is utterly ludicrous.

Wasn't it you, less than a week ago, who made the argument to go after the 'unvoting' women?  Someone did.

If we increase our turnout among single women, the elderly, the hispanic, and really INCREASE TURNOUT, say get 20 million of the women who didn't vote in 2004 to vote democrat (yes I'm being idealistic) across the board, across the country - that would make a hell of a difference.

If they're right about the new voters being men, that means female democratic turnout was good.

One huge difference between us and third way is that they like a message that's good for pursuasion, because they think all the pursuasion happens on TV, because they DC elite would love for that to be true.

We, on the other hand, tend to favor a message that motivates turnout. If you believe their study, and you look at the exit polls, more men were pursuaded and more women were motivated. Everyone wins. The difference is that motivation helps to build a movement, pursuasion is just how you control the masses.

As one of the co-authors of the Third Way study, I wanted to respond to the comments by Chris and others that it doesn't seem possible that 9 of 10 new Democratic voters in 2006 were men.

It's true that Democratic margins increased within nearly every demographic group - women, men, African-Americans, unmarried women, Evangelicals, etc. But the turnout among these voters changed quite a bit between 2004 and 2006. So, for example, D's not only did better by 12.2-points among men (from an 8.8-point loss to a 3.4-point victory), male turnout also increased from 46.3% to 48.3% of the electorate. And this combination of better margins and better turnout propel each other (think about really tagging a baseball with a stiff breeze straight out to centerfield - or leftfield for that matter).

And that also means that turnout among women fell from 53.7% to 51.7% (hitting the ball into the wind). And in an election of 78 million votes, differences of that size really makes a difference.

A better example is African-Americans, where the difference in turnout is really striking. In 2004, 11.8% of the electorate was A-A, in 2006 it was 9.9%. That's a decline of A-A turnout of 16%! So even though we did well among the 9.9% that turned out to vote, we could have done even better if A-A turnout was higher.

Is an off-year election going to be different than a presidential election in terms of turnout? Yes, and we mention that in our report.

But Democrats still have to run and win in off-years.

Anyway, check out the report at www.third-way.com. You may like it; you may think it's interesting; you may not.  

I'm going to wait until I get to read the whole thing and the conclusions and present a longer analysis then, but it's pretty clear that this is some seriously tortured data. You're trying to normalize two orthogonal datasets. You can't just do that. This isn't like taking two baseball players and normalizing their number of games. It's like taking two players from two different leagues and trying to compare them.

There was a strong whiff of tortured data in the last one, too, where the middle class squeeze magically disappeared.

I think there's a lot of potential in 3rd Way's overall approach, because fundamentally there are plenty of bottom line rationales for progressive change. But in the meantime I agree with Chris about the most damaging aspect of this: some doofus will invariably wave this around on Sunday, and it will be on the way to becoming yet another part of the conventional wisdom that needs to be dislodged.

I registered Republican when I was 18, but within a year or two I'd informed myself enough about politics to realize I didn't support most of their stances.  From the first election I participated in I always voted Democratic.  For years I meant to do something about my party affiliation, but upon refliection I decided that with the electoral system for presidential elections, since my state (OK) always voted for the Republican I figured I had more of an influence if I could vote in the primary; whereas my vote in the actual election gets chucked every time due to my neighbors' preferences.

I changed in '03 I think so I could vote for Dean in the primary.  Even in the primaries though I've never felt like my vote mattered, OK is so far down the line that usually it's already decided by then--I hadn't realized that until '04, or again I might have changed parties earlier.  But I made the party change anyway, if for no other reason than to end any and all association with the GOP.

Anyway, that year the Dems got a new party member but didn't gain any votes from it, b/c I'd already been voting Dem.  It may be a very small figure, perhaps less than a percentage point, but there have to be a lot of people changing party registration because of what the Republicans have become in the last 6 years, and many of them were probably voting for Dems as often as not (sidebar:  like many if not most Oklahomans, my family have been registered Dems for decades but always vote for reepubs.  The opposite must happen to some degree in the national view)...so maybe there's a tiny bit of inflation to these figures from Rinos changing parties.

Again, it probably doesn't add up to much difference, but I thought I'd throw that possibility out there.