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Tuesday evening, as the polls were closing in most of the country, a young black Milwaukeean named Andre Douglas tweeted that only 4.7% of blacks had voted in his home state. It’s still not quite clear where he got this incorrect information — my best guess is that he or someone he knew misread a report that only 4.7% of Wisconsin voters had been African American — but the stat spread like wildfire on Twitter that night, quickly losing its connection to Wisconsin and becoming a “fact” about the country as a whole.

The claim was greeted with skepticism by many, but the doubters were overwhelmed by the believers. The story was repeated so often that it — combined with the news that the US Senate would be losing its only black member — turned the term “African Americans” into a Twitter trending topic for much of Wednesday.

Why did this false claim, first made by a guy with fewer than three hundred followers, blow up so big? Three reasons, I think…

First, it couldn’t be easily debunked.

You might think that how many African Americans voted in this week’s election would be a fact you could quickly Google, but if you did, you’d be wrong. It’s not a stat that appeared in any media coverage of the election, and — as I discovered when a friend on Twitter asked if anyone knew the true number — calculating involves tracking down data from a bunch of different sources.

If folks had been able to research the claim and quickly post a link to a more accurate number, they would have done so. But they couldn’t, so they didn’t. (Almost immediately after I posted my own estimate of black turnout — something like 34% — yesterday evening, my site started lighting up with the results of Google searches on the stat.)

Second, midterm election turnout is an obscure subject.

What percentage of Americans turn out to vote in a typical midterm election? How much less (or more) likely are blacks to vote than whites? How much did voter turnout rise in 2008, and what has happened to midterm voting numbers after elections similar to 2008’s?

I could have given you pretty good answers to most of these questions yesterday, but I’m a historian of American social movements who specializes in issues of race and electoral politics. And even I would have been guessing about some of them.

But unless you have this data — unless you’ve got at least a solid hunch about what off-year turnout numbers should look like — you’re not going to be able to form your own opinion about whether the 4.7% stat makes sense.

If you don’t know whether overall turnout in 2010 was 20% or 40% or 60% (and most Americans don’t) and you don’t know whether blacks typically turn out 90% as often as whites or 60% or 30% as often (and again, most Americans don’t), then you’re not going to be able to assess the stat’s plausibility on your own.

Third, it reinforced a belief that was already there.

For whatever reason, the false stat circulated almost exclusively among African American Twitter users. For those who shared it, it served to reinforce beliefs that they already held about low levels of black civic engagement — and in many cases a cynicism about the shallowness of black support for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Interestingly, though, those beliefs are themselves false — or at least exaggerated. It’s true that blacks tend to vote at lower levels than whites, but the differences aren’t dramatic, as figures from recent elections show.

In 2004, when John Kerry ran for president against George W Bush, 65.4% of white citizens voted in the November election, as opposed to 60% of blacks. In the midterm elections of 2006, the figures were 49.7% for whites and 41% for blacks. And in 2008, with Obama on the ballot, blacks were more likely to vote than whites — by a margin of 64.7% to 64.4%.

The gap between white and black turnout does exist, but it’s not huge — in 2006, the last midterm election for which we have data, it was about the same as the gap between 35-44 year olds (45.5%) and 45-54 year olds (53.8%), and considerably smaller than the gap between married people (56.2%) and divorced people (42.9%).

“African Americans” is a trending topic on Twitter right now, thanks in large part to tweets repeating the claim that only 4.7% (or, in some tweets, 4% or 5% or 10%) of blacks bothered to vote yesterday.

But it’s not true. None of it is anywhere close to true.

The real number is about 34%.

Official stats on voting by race aren’t kept, but from exit polls, vote totals, and census information, you can estimate this stuff pretty well. About 38% of the voting age population of the United States turned out to vote in yesterday’s election. There are about 26.5 million African Americans of voting age in the United States. According to exit poll data, blacks made up about 10% of the total electorate this year. About 90 million people voted in this election, and if 10% of them were black, that makes 9 million. Nine million is 34% of 26.5 million.

In other words, about a third of black adults voted this year, a percentage that’s only slightly lower than the population as a whole.

So where did the 4.7% thing come from? A tweet posted yesterday evening seems to be the source. That tweet, as you can see, is only about Wisconsin, and the guy who tweeted it later clarified that he was only referring to Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District.

But even that doesn’t make any sense, for a bunch of reasons. But it turns out that Wisconsin’s population is about 6% black, which means that if blacks in Wisconsin were voting at slightly lower numbers than whites, they could easily make up about 4.7% of the total vote in the state.

I can’t prove it yet, but I’m betting someone posted that stat somewhere, someone else misread it, and that’s how this whole thing got started.

James C. Russell is a perennial candidate for Congress in Westchester, NY, a suburb of New York City. After running and losing in three Republican primaries in a row, he managed to win the GOP nomination to take on Democratic incumbent Nita Lowey in New York’s 18th CD in 2008. He lost that race in a landslide, but came back to get the nomination again this year.

It’s a standard story in lopsided districts, and was never one that drew — or deserved — much attention. Until this September.

That was when the news broke that back in 2001 Russell had written an essay in which he described school integration as a conscious plot to foster race-mixing in America. Specifically, he wrote, the integration of schools was an effort to undermine “appropriate ethnic boundaries” in the sexual preferences of “white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.” That plot, he said, was buttressed by efforts by “media moguls” to “deliberately popularize miscegenation” in movies targeted toward teens and pre-teens.

Russell’s views were repeatedly denounced in local media and in blogs from coast to coast. The state Democratic Party attacked him in the strongest possible language, while the Republicans quickly repudiated him, trying — and failing — to get him off the ballot entirely.

Yesterday Jim Russell picked up 38% of the vote in the 18th, improving his 2008 performance by six points.

Sheesh.

So what happened with the youth vote in 2010?

Well, you can expect to see a lot of this in the coming days:

The youth vote was a bust for the Democratic Party this year. Young voters plummeted as a share of the electorate and support for the Democrats declined. Where young voters went for Obama by a two-to-one margin, barely more than half supported his party yesterday. Young voters made up just 11% of those casting ballots. Obamamania was a fad, and it’s over.

On the other hand…

Young voters were the only age cohort to support the Democratic party yesterday, and though their support for the Dems did decline, it declined less than any other age group’s. Between 2006 and 2010 over-65 voters’ support for the Dems dropped by nine points, 45-64 year olds’ dropped by seven, and 30-44 year olds’ dropped by six. But the proportion of young voters supporting the party dropped by just four points — from 60% to 56% — and their support for the GOP rose by just two points.

Young voters were the only age cohort to support the Democrats this cycle — as noted above, 56% of them cast their votes for that party. No other age group gave more than 47% of their votes to the Dems, and seniors went for the GOP by a 58-40 margin after narrowly supporting the Democrats in the 2006 elections.

Young voters’ turnout as a share of the national electorate stayed pretty much stable when compared with four years ago — the figures I’ve seen suggest that it dropped from 12% to 11%, but given the way the numbers are counted, that may just be statistical noise. (Also, I haven’t seen any national turnout numbers yet, but if voting was up across the board then the youth vote could have risen considerably while not showing any increase as a proportion of the whole. I’ll update when I get that data.)

Turnout is lower for midterm elections than it is in election years. That’s true for every demographic, but the dropoff is particularly steep for youth voters. That’s always been the case, and it likely always will be. Old people vote in the midterms and young people (including people in their thirties and forties) don’t. Also, youth support for Obama in 2008 was so intense that a regression toward the mean was inevitable.

So no, young voters didn’t save the Democratic party yesterday. (Given the way the party has treated them for the last two years, it would have been shocking if they had.) But yesterday could have been a lot worse for the Dems, and if young people had stayed home, or voted in line with the way that older voters did, it would have been.

Update | While I was working on this piece, the Washington Post put up a story on the youth vote that followed the script I warned about above pretty much to the letter. It’ll be the first of many.

“If no one out there understands, start your own revolution and cut out the middleman.”

–Billy Bragg