CONCORD, N.H. -- The traffic-clogging lines that curl into Barack Obama's rallies contain a diverse group, from mothers toting young children to bearded professionals in sturdy all-weather boots. But perhaps most desirable are voters like Lynn Xie, who waited in a quarter-mile-long line last week to hear the Illinois senator speak.
"It's really exciting for me," said the Dartmouth College student, boning up for her first presidential election. "I just turned 19."
Obama turned the Democratic contest on its ear last week with a decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses, generated in large part by overwhelming support from voters younger than 30.
Nearly six in 10 in that age bracket supported Obama - more than five times the number that voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
There were as many Democratic Iowa voters in their teens and 20s as over age 65, resulting in a 30 percent increase in young caucus- goers compared with 2004.
The Obama campaign is trying to replicate that result in tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, and perhaps ride it to the Democratic nomination.
The target is enticing: 86,000 New Hampshire residents reached voting age over the past five years, according to a recent report by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. That, combined with 207,000 people moving into the state, many of them young families, "has produced considerable turnover in the pool of potential voters," the report found.
It is a strategy not without risk. Conventional wisdom holds that older people are more regular voters, and campaigns have long found it more productive to target those who have reliably gone to the polls in the past than to rely on the unknown.
Even so, young voters have long been a Holy Grail for politcos. In recent years, efforts like MTV's Rock the Vote and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' "Vote or Die" have tried to mobilize young voters - with mixed results.
"Let's get real: Howard Dean had that too, and it only took him so far," said Jason Palitsch, 18, a student at Northeastern University in Massachusetts attending a Clinton rally this week. But in an era when social networking Web sites are sponsoring presidential debates, the rules may be undergoing a rewrite.
Clinton has responded. She is trying to reach out to young voters in New Hampshire, inviting a few for a ride on her campaign bus on Saturday to talk with her and her 27-year-old daughter, Chelsea.
