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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

I’ve heard several reports of student voters being challenged or turned away from the polls today, and a quick Google is turning up more. I’ll be collecting those stories and links here as the evening rolls on.

If you’ve got word of something I’ve missed, let me know.

CONNECTICUT | Three student voters from U Conn were challenged by “unofficial election checkers” deployed by the Republican Party to a local polling place, according to a district election official. All three challenges were rejected.

IOWA | Students at Central College were turned away from the polls when election officials refused to accept their dormitory housing contracts or college directory listings as proof of residency.

MICHIGAN | Reports say that students at the University of Michigan and Michigan State were turned away from the polls because the state had “automatically changed their addresses to match their driver’s licenses instead of their University of Michigan address.” More on the Michigan situation here.

SOUTH CAROLINA | The state Democratic Party says that self-described Tea Party activists harassed student voters this morning at Benedict College, a historically black institution in Columbia, SC. Other reports from Benedict indicate that student voters there were challenged and forced to submit provisional ballots.

VIRGINIA | Someone allegedly broke into Representative Tom Perriello’s campaign offices early this morning and tampered with door hangers meant for distribution at the University of Virginia, mixing up packets so that students would be directed to the wrong polling places. The campaign discovered the sabotage before noon, but many of the materials had already been distributed by then. (Perriello lost his re-election battle by a slim margin.)

Last Wednesday UC Berkeley Junior Laura Zelko finally got her day in court. Or “court.”

Sort of.

Zelko has been charged with five violations of the Berkeley code of conduct for her involvement in last November’s student protests. She’s the second such student to have received a hearing, and the first to choose to have her hearing conducted in public. (According to the Berkeley Daily Cal, seventeen students’ conduct cases remain unresolved.)

Zelko’s panel, composed of two professors, two students, and an assistant dean, met for eleven hours on Wednesday, but were unable to conclude their work. They will meet again sometime after November 8 to continue their deliberations.

Three members of the Berkeley community livetweeted the hearing, which saw confusion as to which version of the Berkeley code was being deployed and disagreement about whether it could legitimately proceed at all. University regulations mandate that such hearings be held within 45 days of the alleged conduct violation, but that provision was suspended last spring. Zelko asked that the charges against her be dropped due to the delay in bringing action against her, but the committee chose to proceed.

If you only read one summary of the current crisis in higher education in Britain this week, make it this one.