28 percent of OWS protesters are over 40
Almost half of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are under 30 years old, but a sizable portion are 40 and above.
A man walks past Zuccotti Park in rainy New York, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have been encamped for over one month, on October 19, 2011. More than 28 percent of the Wall Street protesters are aged 40 and older.
Mike Segar/Reuters
Over at WSJ, Aaron Rutkoff has a fascinating deep dive into the data as far as who is actually Occupying Wall Street...
The protesters as a group are young, but Zuccotti Park is not nearly the youth-only movement depicted in the media. While 49% of protesters are under 30, more than 28% are 40 or older. Only one-third of the crowd considers themselves Democrats — nearly the same portion who say they don’t identify with any party. (Zero respondents labeled themselves Republican.)
Schoen finds reason to be skeptical of the protesters’ professed motivation: the inequities of the U.S. economic system. “The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%),” he writes in his essay. But those numbers might not be the best way to assess the economic health of the protest group.
Aaron's data comes from pollster Douglas Schoen, he conducted face-to-face interviews with 198 people down at the epicenter of the movement.