Washington – America’s political samurai are coming to terms with a new reality in the 2008 presidential election: Young voters, who have made little impact in national politics over the past three decades, are emerging as a growing, influential slice of the electorate.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the war in Iraq caught the new generation’s attention and have made politics seem more relevant. Recent surveys show the rate of participation for voters younger than 30 leapt in the 2004 and 2006 elections.
Jeanne Shaheen, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, points to a startling development that took place in 2004.
For decades, the most prized age group for politicians has been the elderly, who count on government pensions and medical care and vote in record numbers.
But “there were a million more voters under the age of 30 who voted in 2004 than over the age of 65,” Shaheen said.
Shaheen previously ran campaigns and served three terms as New Hampshire governor.
“For 30 years after 18-year- olds got the right to vote, we saw a continuous gradual decline in their participation,” Shaheen said. “That began to reverse itself in 2004.”
And in 2006, according to the institute’s research, heavy turnout in college towns and otherwise youthful communities like Charlottesville, Va., and Missoula, Mont., played a key role in the election of Democratic senators in both states – Jim Webb in Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana.
“Coming out of the major increases in young voter turnout in 2004 and 2006, and given the size of the political demographic and the increase in energy, 2008 will be a year when young adults have the potential to make their voices heard,” said Kat Barr, a 29-year-old communications director at Young Voter Strategies, a nonprofit group at George Washington University.
Global in their thinking
Though in many ways, young voters reflect the values of generations who came before them – they were among the most supportive of the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, for instance – they promise to bring a different viewpoint to American politics.
As a whole, under-30 voters are more tolerant and libertarian when it comes to issues of race, sexual orientation and gender. They describe themselves as religious but have a larger segment of professed atheists and agnostics than previous generations.
They are patriotic but global in outlook, and far prefer that U.S. foreign policy be based on multilateral agreements rather than unilateral displays of force. They have helped shove global warming and Darfur onto the American political agenda.
A March poll by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that the most secular generation of Americans is that whose members are younger than 30 – with 19 percent saying they have no strong religious beliefs at all.
Of voters born since 1977, 94 percent told Pew that they had no objections to interracial dating, displaying more tolerance than those born before 1946 (65 percent) or the baby boom generation born between 1946 and 1964 (84 percent). Similar, if not so dramatic, differences exist on questions regarding women’s rights and homosexuality.
“The decline in social conservatism is being hastened by generational change,” the Pew pollsters reported. “The newest age cohort expresses agreement with even fewer conservative values.”
Shaheen was surprised to discover that, when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the support for multilateralism and a global outlook is as deep among non-college students as among their counterparts on the campuses. Seventy-five percent of college students believe the United Nations and other countries should take the lead in solving international crises and conflicts, as do 73 percent of young voters not in college. Among all adults, in a survey by CBS News and The New York Times last summer, the preference for multilateralism was 59 percent.
Liberal on social issues
At the moment, largely because of perceived Republican missteps in Iraq, on Capitol Hill and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, young voters (Harvard calls them “the Millennial Generation” and Pew calls them “Generation Y”) are leaning toward the Democratic Party.
“The youth vote is critical (and) has become more and more Democratic,” Republican political strategist Mike Murphy told a conference on young voters at Harvard this spring. And so the GOP, he joked, has “come up with a plan to move the voting age to 40.”
Beyond the impact of the Iraq war and Katrina, said Murphy, Republican candidates suffer among young voters from the emphasis the party’s leaders have placed on conservative social issues to fire up the GOP base.
“You can increasingly make an argument American politics is becoming more aligned by culture than by class, and we therefore are losing votes because many of the positions that we are perceived to take, particularly on social issues, have their least support demographically in polling with voters under 30,” Murphy said.
That doesn’t mean the Democrats have the young vote locked up in 2008. Recent polls show Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having narrow, but not insurmountable, leads among young voters in head-to-head match-ups with Republican front-runners.
Within the parties, Obama leads Clinton 35 percent to 29 percent in an April poll of Democratic voters ages 18 to 24 taken by the Institute of Politics. Obama had a strong lead among young men, but Clinton beat him by 6 points among young Democratic women.
On the Republican side, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (31 percent) led Arizona Sen. John McCain (18 percent) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (8 percent) in the poll of young Republican voters.
Digitally connected
The Harvard poll was an online survey, rather than a traditional telephone poll – an illustration of the challenges in corralling younger voters whose lives, far more than those of their elders, are tethered to laptops and cellphones.
In the past, the disconnectedness of young voters made them an expensive group to target. But as the Internet has grown, features like blogs, Podcasts, text messaging, My Space, YouTube and Facebook have given politicians new opportunities to form networks at much less cost. At the same time, the states have embraced early voting, absentee voting and mail-in balloting.
Together, these developments have “broken down some of the mechanical barriers” that kept young people out of politics and the polls, said Massachusetts pollster John Della Volpe, an expert on young voters.
Sept. 11 “changed everything,” Della Volpe said. Previously, younger voters were likely to answer questions about politics by saying, “It’s just some old white guy who doesn’t care about me. Why care?”
Then “all of a sudden, politics mattered,” said Della Volpe. The Sept. 11 attacks, and America’s response, “awakened the political spirit of this generation.”
At the same time, technological advances allowed political organizers to mobilize millions of people online.
“It’s grassroots politics on steroids,” Della Volpe said.
