Well, we’re gonna make you proud this year. We’re gonna come out in numbers you’ve never seen before.

–P. Diddy, promising to deliver the youth vote in an interview with Hillary Clinton

Oops. Looks like Diddy will be eating bling-bling pie tonight. The AP reports on the youth-vote flop:

This was not the breakout year for young voters that some had anticipated. Fewer than one in 10 voters Tuesday were 18 to 24, about the same proportion of the electorate as in 2000, exit polls indicated.

The MTV-saturated kids who stayed home rather than cast ill-informed votes are role models. Diddy and Diaz and company would do well to emulate these silent youth next campaign season and spare us all their lowest-common-denominator histrionics.

Update: Jonah Goldberg reacts…

BWAA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Look I don’t know what the final tally will be. But it’s now clear that the youth vote just didn’t show. The liberal blogosphere is grumpy and introspective about it. I love it for reasons I will be writing about for months to come. The cult of the youth voter remains, once again, the most absurd, bogus, childish, romantic and misguided joke of liberal American politics. Period.

Update II: Just caught a little of a grim P. Diddy on Hardball while channel-surfing. When glum Chris Matthews asked Diddy how he explained exit polls showing young people split 50-50 over the war on Iraq, Diddy dodged, then mumbled:

You can’t put ‘em in a box and tell ‘em where to go.

Priceless.