The meme since Tuesday, which we heard first on NBC, has been that the youth vote didn't materialize. New reports say the opposite:

Under-30 voters came through in big numbers this year, with more than 20 million casting a ballot for president, researchers found. The turnout bested their 2000 showing by more than nine percentage points and heartened activists who worked to get young voters to the polls.

Researchers at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at the University of Maryland found that 18- to 29-year-old turnout was up by 4.6 million voters from exit poll data from the 2000 election. They based their calculations on exit polls done for The Associated Press and others by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.The figures also beat exit poll numbers from 1992, the last time the youth vote spiked amid an otherwise general decline in turnout since 18-year-olds first got the chance to vote in 1972.

The young voters preferred Kerry to Bush: