McCain, Obama outcome determined by youth vote?

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Farris Johnson and Rachel Easterbrook, both 16, aren’t old enough to cast a vote in November for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

That hasn’t stopped the teen duo and several of their underage friends from volunteering with the Obama campaign. After school and on the weekends, they hit the streets with bags swelling with voter registration cards and high hopes of dispelling Internet rumors many young people believe.

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TRACY GLANTZ/McClatchy Newspapers

Daniel McKelvey, left, and Winnie Gordon, of Columbia, works on tally sheets at the Obama campaign headquarters after campaigning door-to-door in Columbia.

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“Obama is not a Muslim. We hear that one the most,” Johnson said. “We talk to people about how he’s someone who is listening, someone who’s in tune with our generation.”

Such youthful exuberance is creating buzz that, after many false stops and starts, 2008 is the year in which the youth vote wins an election.

“There are enough 18- to 29-year-olds that if they really did rise up and there was a significant bias in which direction they voted, they really could sway an election as close as this one,” said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University political scientist.

Polling shows a large youth turnout would benefit Obama, a young father who plays basketball, listens to hip-hop artist Jay-Z on his iPod and only recently paid off his student loans.

Recent Gallup polls show a breakdown of 18- to 29-year-olds preferring Obama to Republican nominee John McCain 55-40 percent because of his stance on issues like environmental conservation and ending the war in Iraq.

“This is really the year that young people are going to make it happen,” predicts John Trowell, 21, a volunteer with South Carolina’s Obama campaign.

Certainly, McCain is making a play for young voters, too, despite being a grandfather who loves the ’70s pop music group ABBA and who admits to knowing little about computers.

During the 1980s, Republicans won the twenty-something voting bloc with wide margins. Ronald Reagan, the oldest president, owned the youth vote in 1980 and 1984.

Patrick Haddon, state chairman of the South Carolina Federation of Young Republicans, sees plenty of young people fired up for McCain, particularly since he named Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska his vice presidential pick.

“How cool would it be to have an energetic vice president in her 40s?” Haddon said.

McCain has something else in his favor: history.

Younger voters do not show up at the polls at the same level as older voters who, this election cycle, prefer the Arizona senator.

“By far, it’s better to have a lead with old people than the young,” said Larry Sabato, political scientist at the University of Virginia.

Youth support didn’t win the White House for Howard Dean in 2004 despite abundant campaigning on college campuses and using the Internet for youth outreach.

And it didn’t pan out for anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern, who, in 1972, excited the youth vote.

Statistically, fewer than half of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in 1972, the first year 18-year-olds earned the right. By 1976, it was 42 percent.

Recent elections haven’t improved the situation, with only 32 percent in 2000 and a slight uptick in 2004.