Young Voters

SALISBURY -- From Don Singleton's class on political communication at Salisbury State University, the making of the president 1996 seems a lamentable thing -- populated by the ethically challenged and reported by the unprincipled to the thoroughly distracted.Among these younger voters, the suggestion that "trust" might be a crucial issue in this year's campaign is almost laughable."Trust is pretty much a dead issue," said Jennifer Young of Hollywood, Md. This is so because "politicians are corrupt."

WASHINGTON - Joe Hilton and his friends at the University of Central Florida do not look much like soccer moms or senior citizens. But in Florida, a battleground state in the race for the White House, that may not matter. What matters is that as Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore remain locked in a tight race heading toward the November finish line, their campaigns believe an oft-neglected bloc of young voters could help tilt the outcome in several critical states where the election will be decided.

They are a hard audience to court and a poor investment for candidates: young adults who, with some exceptions, are uninterested and uninvolved in politics and do not vote despite efforts to get them to the polls.In Anne Arundel County, where local candidates say they speak to young voters who attend political club gatherings and encourage them to vote, turnout among the 18- to 24-year-olds in the 1994 primary election was dismal.About half of the 41,718 county residents in that age group registered to vote and 3,253 made it to the polls, according to figures kept by the Census Bureau and local election board.

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.

When MTV tried to get young people to Rock the Vote, it wound up with plenty of rock but not many votes. And when P. Diddy challenged the hip-hop generation to "Vote or Die," it did neither. But this election year, young voters have been a force in the presidential nominating contests. Full of excitement about the Maryland primary tomorrow, young activists are canvassing neighborhoods, volunteering for candidates and Facebooking their friends, urging them to cast ballots on Election Day. "There's just, like, this amazing excitement on campus," said Jonathan Sachs, 20, a sophomore political science major at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Upon hearing that "midterms" are coming up, many voters ages 18-29 still get that queasy feeling that comes with the thought of taking intense exams. I know I do. Perhaps that is one reason we rarely show up for midterm elections. Recent polling suggests that there could be a reduction of more than 40 percent in young voter turnout this year, compared to 2008. But the stakes are high this year, and young people need to show their strength again at the polls or risk losing accurate representation and movement on policy that directly affects them and the issues they care most about.

WASHINGTON -- Change agents running for president probably would do well to leave the ghosts of crises past stashed in the attic. Instead, Sen. Hillary Clinton's latest stumper, Gloria Steinem, is a vision from a time that is, as Sen. Barack Obama's youthful contingent would say, "so yesterday." Appearing in Austin before the Texas primary, Ms. Steinem's words on Mrs. Clinton's behalf merely served to remind young voters why they prefer Mr. Obama. Indeed, the race and gender dimensions of the presidential campaign have been important mostly to an older generation of Americans, including the Clintons, who are slow to recognize that the world they sought to change has, indeed, changed.

MILWAUKEE - They were the pollsters' worst nightmare - and possibly President Bush's, too. Crowds of college students, many of whom registered on Election Day under Wisconsin's relatively permissive voting laws, stampeded to the polls yesterday, in defiance of conventional political wisdom. Political professionals traditionally have scoffed at the power of the youth vote because whatever their numbers, people ages 18 to 24 have had a spotty record of actually going to the polls. But if Wisconsin is any indicator, campaign experts might have to think again.

While support for President Bush among voters ages 18 to 29 is slipping, support among young voters for still-undeclared independent presidential candidate Ross Perot has almost doubled since the early spring.The Gallup Poll shows support for Mr. Bush slipping from 48 percent to 34 percent since the early spring -- the largest decline in Mr. Bush's standing among an age group. Based on interviewing conducted in March and April, 19 percent of voters under 30 backed Mr. Perot; his support level increased to 37 percent last month.

Paul Rogat Loeb's op-ed on March 15, "To win, Democrats must re-energize the youth vote," was an excellent discussion of the importance of young voters to the 2010 elections. In fact, Democrats need to energize the youth vote to win not just in 2010 but in 2012, 2014 and beyond. By 2015, 33 percent of the electorate with be the millennial generation -- no small number of voters. Fortunately for Democrats, young voters can be reached through a number of media -- phone, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter and an ever-growing number of other social networking tools.