Across the country, stories are appearing in big and small newspapers, not to mention a thousand blogs, on the youth-vote impact, and many of them play up the role of technology in the mobilization.
Here’s one in the Richmond, Missouri Daily News, that highlights the new voter registrations: “there are 340,000 first-time voters in the state with 150,000 of them being young voters, ages 18-24. In Kansas City and St. Louis 40 percent of new voters are ages 18-24.”
And in Sacramento, “a combination of keen interest among young people, and campaigns employing the kinds of electronic tools familiar to today’s youth, has pollsters preparing for a historic turnout of young voters. Based on polling and anecdotal evidence, election watchers predict young people will smash registration and turnout records along the way.”
The Washington Post headline here reads, “Thumbs Up to Voting: Tech Tools Reach Youth.”
This story in The Los Angeles Times talks up Matt Damon, Barbara Steisand et al., but highlights Norman Lear: “His nonpartisan voter registration and turnout drive, Declare Yourself, may turn out to have been one of this historic election’s decisive factors. Lear emphasized the importance of the youth vote when most political professionals considered that wasted time.”
And for more on Lear’s activities, here’s something in Reuter’s entitled “TV Producer Norman Lear Enticing Youth to Polls.”
And here’s a piece in the Montgomery Blair High School paper in Maryland with the modest headline, “Campaign and glory for youth volunteers:
Political participation among youth soaring.”
There are many more out there setting the youth vote up as the decisive margin tomorrow. Of course, everything will depend on the numbers. If 18-to-24-year-olds turn out to swing important districts to Obama, they will be a force for years to come in the Democratic Party. But how it will change policies and platforms is unclear. The cohort is so dynamic and fluctuating (an 18-year-old’s interests are different from a 23-year-old’s) that it’s hard to align it with specific political positions. Indeed, that may be one of the most interesting things about the rising youth vote: how it will acquire a political identity, and how politicians will attact it. Here’s The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel giving job creation No. 1 status, but that certainly is nothing unique to the young.
