College students and other young voters turned out to cast ballots for Barack Obama at historic levels in 2008, but whether they will show up in similar numbers to re-elect him remains an open question—one of great interest to both the president and his Republican rivals.
It would be almost impossible to sustain the record-setting level of enthusiasm seen among young voters who backed Mr. Obama in 2008, says Saladin Ambar, an assistant professor of political science at Lehigh University. “You can’t replicate a historic first. There will never be a first African-American president again, or a campaign that featured that real possibility again. I can’t imagine him replicating what he did in ’08, but he may not have to.”
A more pressing matter for campaigns trying to reach young voters, though, might be the voters’ disenchantment with the political process writ large. Since 2000, more college students have volunteered in their communities than have voted, says John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard University Institute of Politics. That could mean that while students want to be civically engaged, they may not see the political process as worth investing their energy in, he says.
There’s every indication that young people still care deeply about their communities, Mr. Della Volpe says. “They just don’t think that voting makes a significant difference in changing the world and changing the country.”
Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, a nonprofit group that encourages young people to be politically active, says young Americans’ frustration with the political atmosphere has been manifested in the past year’s Occupy movement. “There is this sense that special interests, corporate interests, really trump their own,” she says of the students and others whose protests preoccupied the nation for much of the fall.
“On the flip side, though, the only solution to all of that money in politics, the only way really to combat that, is with greater participation, and I think young people today understand that.”
Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University, agrees that voting is just one barometer of young people’s civic engagement. “The way to count it,” he says, “is not just, Did they vote for the Democratic or Republican president, but did they in fact choose not to vote” and in the meantime run an Occupy protest? “That would be a different way of engaging.”
Young people make up about one-fifth of the electorate, with full-time college students representing one-quarter of that group, according to Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
“It’s still a pro-Democratic and pro-Obama constituency,” says Mr. Levine, although data show declines compared with the “astronomically” high levels of support for Mr. Obama in 2008.
Youth Issues
Though they may think the polish has worn off the Obama presidency, that doesn’t necessarily mean young voters won’t show up this year, political observers say. In a March 2008 Pew study, 61 percent of voters age 18 to 29 supported Mr. Obama, while 33 percent favored Sen. John McCain. Four years later, 63 percent of young voters back the president for re-election, according to a more recent Pew survey. The question is, Will they vote?
But only 49 percent of voters age 18 to 29 approve of the president’s job performance, down 24 points since February 2009, Pew data show. Some young voters blame Mr. Obama for their troubles during the recession. Student-loan debt, which is set to surpass the nation’s credit-card debt, is nearing the $1-trillion mark. Last year the unemployment rate for college graduates age 24 and under rose to 9.4 percent, the highest since the Labor Department began keeping track in 1985.
With such daunting financial burdens facing recent graduates, President Obama may have to make a compelling argument to persuade his younger constituents to vote for him again. He began that effort in his State of the Union address in January, when he told colleges he was putting them “on notice” to lower skyrocketing tuition rates or risk losing federal money.
In his address, the president also said he supported immigration reform for students, saying the country should stop “expelling” young illegal immigrants who are pursuing higher education.
Since then he has gone on the stump at community colleges and public universities, making it a point to underscore the importance of college access and affordability. At a speech at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in January, Mr. Obama said, “Higher education is not a luxury—it’s an economic imperative.”
Aside from offering such rhetoric, the president’s administration has made some inroads toward alleviating student-loan debt.
One such effort offers students in the government’s direct-loan program a half-percentage-point reduction in their interest rate if they consolidate certain loans before June.
Another change will lower the cap on the percentage of discretionary income that borrowers in income-based loan-repayment plans pay, from 15 percent to 10 percent.
Still, those efforts would do nothing to halt the rise in youth unemployment.
Mr. Obama’s aspiring Republican rivals have shied away from talking about some of the issues that directly affect students. The campaign Web site for Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, describes his effort to establish public scholarships for any Massachusetts seniors who ranked in the top 25 percent in their high schools.
On the campaign trail, however, Mr. Romney has taken a harder line with young people looking for more government money for college. At a town-hall meeting in Ohio on March 5, he told a high-school student he would not promise government money for tuition, and he encouraged students to shop around for more-affordable colleges or join the military to get a free college education.
Meanwhile, Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, made headlines after he called the president a “snob” for wanting more young people to attend college.
Ms. Smith, of Rock the Vote, says that while the Republican campaigns have not focused as intently on young voters, they may ramp up their outreach as they head into the general election. “When the opportunity has presented itself, they have engaged with young people, ... but beyond that we haven’t seen a ton of activity,” she says. “At the end of the day, I don’t think either party can win without the youth vote, and I think they know that.”
‘Less of a Fairy Tale’
For its part, the Obama campaign isn’t about to take its young base for granted this time around. The campaign has begun reaching out to campus constituents by organizing Student Summits at colleges and universities across the country. As part of the campaign’s strategy to focus on young voters early, students at the summits have been able to tweet their questions to campaign leaders like Jeremy Bird, national field director; Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary who is now an adviser to the campaign; and Jim Messina, campaign manager.
While young voters didn’t change the outcome of the 2008 election by themselves, some experts say their impact helped turn swing states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado from red to blue. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Obama campaign has held a summit on a campus in each of those states in the past two months.
Even if college students are not game changers on Election Day, they are vital to campaigns’ efforts on the ground.
Brian Kennedy II, for instance, volunteered with the Obama campaign as a freshman in 2008 and is volunteering again as a senior at North Carolina Central University, a historically black university that saw a 90-percent turnout of eligible voters in its campus precinct in 2008. Mr. Kennedy, who participated in a Student Summit held at the university in February, says the enthusiasm surrounding the campaign has not been lost, though it has been transformed.
“This time around, people are a little more critical, as they should be,” he says. “It’s less of a fairy-tale atmosphere.”
While young voters are now considered one of the most vocal bases for the Democratic party, it has not always been that way. Indeed, some political observers say the current field of Republican candidates could take a page from President Ronald Reagan’s re-election playbook as they try to reach a younger constituency.
In 1984, under-30 voters picked the Gipper by a margin of 20 points. Alyssa Farah, a spokeswoman for the College Republican National Committee, says Mr. Reagan’s rhetoric and perceived integrity resonated with young voters. She says some young conservatives see a similar integrity of ideals in Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas.
“Ron Paul is very good at delivering the message of independence—independence from your parents, independence from the dole of the government—and it’s very simplistic messaging, but it resonates very well with young people,” she says.
The fact that young people can relate to Mr. Paul’s message is apparent. Mr. Santorum is vastly more popular than Mr. Paul among the general Republican electorate, but Mr. Santorum surpassed Mr. Paul to take second place among youth voters only after the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, on March 13, according to the polling institute at Tufts.
Outside a recent Ron Paul rally in Springfield, Va., a group of students from George Mason University waited impatiently along with some 2,000 others to hear the boisterous, 76-year-old libertarian stalwart. Leo Taffe, a freshman at the university, said, “It’s almost like going to watch the Chili Peppers.”
And with roughly 271,000 online followers—88,000 more than the Santorum campaign—the Paul campaign has used Twitter effectively to reach young voters, says Ms. Smith. “He’s also used social media and invested and engaged volunteers in his campaign in a really impressive way, so people feel like they are part of it,” she says. “That’s a really rewarding experience for someone looking to do something.”
At press time, Mr. Romney had roughly 400,000 Twitter followers. And President Obama? More than 13 million.