Fournier's latest is one of his more disingenuous pieces, and that's saying a lot. My alternative assessment is that he simply doesn't know how to read statistics, and he has passed the fruit of his ignorance on as a revolutionary fact. I'm not sure which is worse.
At any rate, he opens his National Journal column thus:
In a stunning turnaround, likely voters in the so-called millennial generation prefer a Republican-led Congress after next week's elections, and young Hispanics are turning sharply against President Obama.
A new national poll of 18-to-29-year-olds by Harvard's Institute of Politics shows that young Americans are leaving the new Democratic coalition that twice elected Obama.
Fournier's subtle glee is crudely deafening, but before we join him in declaring the Millennial generation a dead zone for Democrats, it's wise to read directly what the Institute actually says:
A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics ... finds slightly more than half (51%) of young Americans who say they will "definitely be voting" in November prefer a Republican-run Congress with 47 percent favoring Democrat control....
[Only] 26% ... report they will "definitely" vote in the midterms [emphases mine].
So the "stunning turnaround," as Fournier characterizes it, excludes 74% of the generational "cohort," and it's only among this 26% that a very slight Republican advantage is detected--for a midterm election, in which Democratic voters only haphazardly show up.
In short, there's not much to see in the Institute's polling, but you'd never know it by reading Ron Fournier's column on it.
***
In fairness I should add that there has been a "turnaround" in the cohort's preferences compared to 2010 (which was 55 percent to 43 percent in Democrats' favor). For an 8-point drop (much of which could be attributed to margin of error), the modifier "stunning" is scarcely warranted, however.