In his presidential acceptance speech last week, Barack Obama gave a nod to his youngest and most loyal supporters, who, he said, had “rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy.”
Indeed, voters ages 18 to 29 turned out more than they had since 1972, the first presidential election after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. And they supported Mr. Obama by an unprecedented margin, casting their ballots 2 to 1 for him over John McCain, according to national exit polls.
Many young voters and political organizers said they felt they had silenced naysayers and proved a point. “Young people do vote, they do matter, and when you pay attention to them, they pay attention to you,” said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Groups’ New Voters Project. “The recognition that young people are a potent political force and that they are incredibly engaged citizens is exciting and long overdue.”
Final statistics on the youth vote were still incomplete late last week, but experts estimated that between 22 million and 24 million young people had voted in the election, an increase of at least two million over the previous presidential election, in 2004.
Those numbers would reflect a turnout rate of between 49.3 percent and 54.5 percent of all eligible voters under 30. The highest participation rate on record for that age group, in 1972, is 55.4 percent. In 2004, the rate was 48 percent, and in 1996, just 37 percent.
General voter turnout in this election, estimated at 62.5 percent, did not set the record some observers had predicted, but young people still contributed to an overall increase over 2004.
“We’re talking about either a modest uptick or close to a record-setting rate” in youth turnout compared with 2004, said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University. Young people represented 18 percent of all voters in the presidential election, a greater share than did people over 65.
And young voters’ overwhelming support for Mr. Obama figured prominently in several battleground states. “Any state where it was close, you could attribute a lot of importance to the youth vote,” Mr. Levine said.
In Florida, which went to Mr. Obama, 61 percent of young voters chose the Democratic candidate, according to exit polls. Among middle-aged voters, the race was nearly even, and 53 percent of older voters favored Mr. McCain.
Mr. Obama also won Indiana, where 63 percent of young voters chose him. His Republican rival prevailed in every other age group in the state.
In North Carolina, where Mr. Obama won by a narrow margin, a whopping 74 percent of young people cast their ballots for Mr. Obama, exit polls showed. There, too, all voters over 30 gave the edge to Mr. McCain.
Three red states were turned blue in last week’s election “completely because of the youth vote,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Nationally, 66 percent of young voters chose Mr. Obama, and 32 percent Mr. McCain, according to exit polls.
Barriers to Voting
Determined college students endured long waits and other obstacles to vote last week. At Temple University, in Philadelphia, the student government hired a DJ to make four-hour lines more fun. The New Voters Project passed out umbrellas and ponchos when it started to rain.
Students at Lincoln University, an historically black institution in Pennsylvania, reported waiting an average of five and a half hours to vote at their precinct off the campus.
At the University of South Florida, where one polling station showed a 66-percent increase in voting over 2004, a running back for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Earnest Graham, signed autographs and chatted with students waiting in line.
Despite reports of students facing long lines and other barriers to voting, the problems generally proved milder than expected. Lines at campus polling places weren’t much worse than those seen at other voting locations, and few rivaled the waits reported at some colleges in the previous presidential election.
Some students, though, discovered that their nebulous campus addresses were an obstacle. At Grinnell College, in Iowa, the votes of 50 students were challenged because the students gave the college’s general campus address rather than their individual dormitory rooms when they registered to vote. A precinct board eventually ruled the votes will be counted.
Several states, like Arizona and Indiana, enacted laws since the 2006 election that require voters to provide specific forms of identification at the polls. Some critics said such laws would restrict students who tried to vote at their college campuses.
Christina Rocks, a junior at Arizona State University, thought she was prepared for the Arizona law that requires identification at the polls: She brought her driver’s license, her passport, a utility bill, and her voter-registration card. But she still had to argue with poll workers because her driver’s license listed her parents’ address, not her campus address. She said several other students in line had to use provisional ballots because they lacked proper identification.
Although most problems were chalked up to miscommunication or a lack of readiness at the polls, there were several deliberate attempts to suppress student voting. All 30,000 students at George Mason University, in Virginia, received an e-mail message on the morning of Election Day that appeared to come from the university’s provost. It told them that voting had been pushed back a day. Many young voters from Florida to Idaho reported receiving text messages bearing a similar lie.
Tech-savvy students, however, appeared not to have been deceived by the false messages.
“Students who got this sent it to their friends saying, ‘Isn’t this funny?’” said Natalie Holtzinger, a campus organizer for the Missouri Public Interest Research Group who spoke to many students who had received the text message. “I didn’t talk to anyone who took this seriously.”
‘Honking Horns and Screaming’
Many students had organized early-voting campaigns to make sure their classmates got to the polls. Chontay Combs, a freshman at Indiana University at Bloomington, went to vote last month at the campus gym, and the lines were so long that she took a shuttle to a polling place downtown.
On Election Day, she distributed “I rocked the vote” stickers on the campus, but by 10:15 a.m., she had run out. “Everyone wanted to show that they had voted,” she said. That night, after the results were known, everyone wanted to celebrate, Ms. Combs said: “For hours on end, students were driving around campus honking horns and screaming, ‘Obama!’”
Revelry broke out on many college campuses across the country. “It was just crazy excitement,” said Gary Brown, a senior at North Carolina A&T State University and an organizer for the Obama campaign.
Some revelers at the Eastman School of Music, at the University of Rochester, ran into minor trouble with the city police, according to news reports. In a spontaneous parade, eight students began to march from a dormitory to the local Democratic headquarters, playing trombones, trumpets, drums, a guitar, and cymbals. Officers responded to noise complaints and charged them with unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor.
Now What?
The last presidential candidate to earn such resounding support from young voters was Ronald Reagan. In the 1984 election, 59 percent of young voters picked him over Walter Mondale. That generation has remained relatively conservative since, said Mr. Levine.
Whether this young generation will continue to favor Democratic candidates is an open question, he said. “There is a very significant possibility that if you lock on young voters for their first time that you can hold them.”
One political organizer lamented last week that young people’s support for Mr. Obama did not contribute to even greater gains for Democrats than they made in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives this election.
Jane Fleming Kleeb, executive director of the Young Voter Political Action Committee, a Democratic group, predicted that statistics, which were not yet available, would show that about 15 percent of young people who voted for president left the rest of their ballots blank.
Mr. Della Volpe was unsure if young supporters of Mr. Obama would necessarily have voted a straight Democratic ticket. “Young people are not robots. Because they vote for Obama doesn’t mean they blindly cast ballots for everyone who has a ‘D’ next to their name,” he said.
“Obama earned their vote,” Mr. Della Volpe added. “He made them a focal point of his campaign from Day 1.”
The Obama campaign and its youth-vote director built a grass-roots network of campus chapters that made phone calls, canvassed, planned events, and used technology to mobilize college students.
How mobilized students stay remains to be seen. But one coalition of young voters, including the United States Student Association, will convene this month to set an agenda for the president-elect’s first 100 days in office.
Some political organizers plan to promote new legislation for the environment, health care, higher education, and other issues through grass-roots lobbying efforts.
“Barack Obama alone will not bring about any of these changes,” said Mr. Brown, of North Carolina A&T.
“It’s going to take collective effort from young people and the nation in general,” he added. “We can’t sit around and expect miracles from this man.”
Ms. Combs, of Indiana University, agreed. “We have to show politicians that we are going to continue to care,” she said. “We don’t want to be famous just for voting in the presidential election.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 55, Issue 12, Page A21