The Year of the Youth Vote

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The Ground Game
Obama is tapping into a broad audience of energized young voters hungry for change, according to a new TIME poll of under-30 Americans. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents said they feel the country is headed down the wrong track, with majorities expressing worries about jobs, affordable health care and the war in Iraq. Their interest in the election exceeds their interest in celebrity news or sports — 7 of 10 said they are paying attention to the race. Obama is the only candidate in either party who is viewed favorably by a majority of young people, and he has half again as much support as his nearest competitor, Democrat or Republican.

But Obama's support among youth is not just a matter of mood; it is a product of effort and organization, of finding his supporters and getting them to the polls. In TIME's national survey, he has a 3-to-2 advantage over Clinton among young voters, but he is doing significantly better than that in actual balloting, thanks to his superior ground game.

No other candidate can claim similar success. Turnout has been lackluster for all Republicans this year. In South Carolina, Obama drew more under-30 votes than all Republican candidates combined, according to exit polls. Mike Huckabee does well among conservative Christian youth, but there is no sign of a surge in their ranks. The young people marching to Ron Paul's drum are long on passion but short on numbers — roughly 3,000 in South Carolina, for example, compared with Obama's estimated 50,000. After gaining strength among voters whose views were formed in the Reagan years, the G.O.P. has the support of only 1 in 3 young people today, and the party's luster has faded among independents.

Obama's outreach to students didn't spring from some starry-eyed principle. It started as a specific element of his early strategy in Iowa. The first-in-the-nation caucuses allow 17-year-olds to vote if they are going to turn 18 before the general election, which means most high school seniors are eligible. To win those kids, Obama did something unusual in politics: he made them a genuine priority. After his rallies in towns across the state, he met backstage with student leaders from the area — a privilege most campaigns reserve for local VIPs and fund raisers. He also hired as his youth-vote coordinator Hans Riemer, a veteran of Rock the Vote, which has been working to mobilize the student vote for years, with increasing success. Riemer extracted a promise that his work would be an integral part of the overall campaign, not a lip-serviced, photo-op'ed afterthought. His timing was perfect. The art of political organizing is in the midst of a broad philosophical overhaul that erases many of the old distinctions between young voters and their elders.

Basically, it's 19th century politics using 21st century tools. The idea is rooted in a deceptively simple truth: voters are more likely to go to the polls if they are asked face-to-face by someone they trust. The rediscovery of this antique notion began in the 1990s when researchers at Yale University published several influential studies proving that personal canvassing is more effective than direct mail or phone calls from strangers. In 2001, Republicans put the idea to a test in several special congressional elections, and the extra money and time devoted to door-knocking produced instant results. So the G.O.P. expanded the effort in 2002, then applied it to presidential politics in 2004. The party's mammoth "72-Hour Project" — named for the final weekend of the campaign, when G.O.P. volunteers made literally millions of personal pitches — helped George W. Bush become the first candidate since 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote.

"It's really the same way we organized back in the heyday of political machines: know your voters and turn them out personally," says George Mason University associate professor Michael McDonald, an expert on voter participation. "Obama has keyed into this and applied it on campus, using students to recruit other students."

What began as a tactic to capture rural caucuses snowballed into a systematic strategy. Obama put his money where his mouth was, spending precious radio and television dollars on ads aimed specifically at Iowa students. A student-to-student phone bank dialed tens of thousands of dorm rooms and cell phones. By Election Day, "we had our entire field operation working to turn them out," says Riemer.

One recent evening in the trendy loft district of downtown St. Louis, students from Missouri campuses gathered at Obama's state headquarters to plan the final phase of their own Super Tuesday effort. Quentin Anderson, 19, welcomed them by saying, "The youth vote is the most important factor in this cycle. We need to keep that momentum going." Glenn Rehn, 25, reported that Obama volunteers at the University of Missouri had collected 800 signed pledges of support before leaving campus for winter break. Kevin Wolfe, 19, said that for his group at Washington University in St. Louis, the Iowa success was like throwing a switch. "People see that he can win, and they are moving off the fence."

As the meeting continued, the students traded ideas for fund-raising concerts and teasingly racy "Show Us Your O-Face" parties. They discussed plans for "dorm-storming," a canvassing technique that matches student volunteers with dormitories where they live or have friends. "It's a very intimate interaction because they're hearing about Obama from someone they already know," Wolfe explained.