Obama's Youth Vote Triumph

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: Obama's Youth Vote Triumph
By DAVID VON DREHLE
Friday, Jan. 04, 2008

Last summer, Barack Obama took a lot of heat for skipping a candidate forum in Iowa sponsored by the AARP, choosing instead to attend a hip-hop event starring Usher. But Obama clearly knew something others didn't, and that zig where others zagged now appears to have been a shrewd move on the path to a dramatic achievement. Obama's youth-oriented campaign drew under-25 voters to Thursday's Iowa caucuses in record numbers, and these first-time voters gave him most of his margin of victory.

Turnout among the youngest slice of the electorate more than doubled from 2004, when Howard Dean's intense campaign on college campuses produced far more modest results. This was part of an overall surge in Democratic participation — but while overall Democratic turnout jumped 90%, the number of young Democrats participating soared 135%.

According to surveys of voters entering the caucuses, young voters preferred Obama over the next-closest competitor by more than 4 to 1. This suggests that the under-25 set — typically among the most elusive voters in all of politics — gave the Illinois senator a net gain of some 17,000 votes; Obama finished roughly 20,000 votes ahead of former senator John Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

"Conventional wisdom" — reflected in an article by this reporter earlier this week — "has a name for candidates who rely on the youth vote: loser," said Michael McDonald, an expert on voter turnout at George Mason University. "Clearly, this was different."...

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1700525,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner