Tech makes this the year of the youth vote

FAIRFAX, Va. -- Alexandra Kernan-Schloss waited in line for 11 hours in 2004 to vote near her school, Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. With just two voting booths at the polling place, she wasn't able to cast her first-ever presidential ballot until 3 a.m. -- after news of her candidate's defeat had been widely reported.

Comment on this article in The Forum.The young Democrat was deflated but determined to get more involved. Now a senior at George Mason University, she has dedicated recent months to registering her peers, advising them about how and where to vote, and getting them pumped up about turning out on Tuesday.

"Ohio was lost," said Kernan-Schloss, a Barack Obama supporter, before heading out for a door-knocking expedition on a cool fall evening. "Virginia won't be lost this time. You can see the difference that we're making."

Kernan-Schloss is one of thousands of young people across the country who are volunteering in the waning days of the presidential campaign to help get out the vote. Hers is a new generation of activists, wooed to the fight for the White House by way of Facebook and Twitter. Text messages keep them in the loop. Technology has facilitated their participation and hooked many of them on politics.

But their final exam in Presidential Politics 101 awaits: Come election time, the 18-to-29-year-old set has been a quadrennial disappointment. They are chronic "underperformers," as political wonks term young voters for failing to match their elders in turnout. The young demographic's participation started at 55 percent in 1972, when a constitutional amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, but turnout has never again been so high. Since then, registered voters under 30 have broken the 50 percent participation mark only once -- in 1992, when a 46-year-old, saxophone-playing Southern governor used late-night television to court the cool cohort.

Young voters' all-time low performance was in 1996, when just 40 percent cast ballots, compared with more than 64 percent of the rest of the electorate. Participation ticked up to 49 percent in 2004 but still trailed those of other age groups, despite a burgeoning anti-war movement.

Will the spread of cyber-activism write a different story this year?

"It takes a while for people, when they reach adulthood, to come to view themselves as voters," said Donald Green, a professor of political science at Yale University and the author of Get Out the Vote. "As a result, they view politics as a kind of bystander. I think they're interested this time around in a way that is unusual. We will know on November 4 about the extent to which that enthusiasm translates to votes."

The 2008 election has, of course, been historic -- and captivating -- for many reasons. Hillary Rodham Clinton came within a hair's breadth of becoming the first woman to win a major party's presidential nomination. Sarah Palin is the GOP's first female vice presidential nominee. And then there is the frenzy around Obama.

Obama's campaign has ignited a fever among young Americans that -- measured by rally turnout, viral music videos, and some state registration numbers -- is unparalleled in modern politics. Obama has embraced new social-networking technologies to reach a broader audience, to keep supporters updated, and -- perhaps most important -- to allow them to not just connect with like-minded people but also organize for the cause.

In its skyrocket phase, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign in many ways set the stage for what Obama has accomplished in reaching out to young people. The former Vermont governor, who now heads the Democratic National Committee, used the Internet to raise money and connect with his supporters. "It certainly was the beginning of new-generation politics," Dean said in a recent interview with National Journal. "But I don't consider myself a candidate of the new generation. I do consider Barack a candidate of the new generation."

Democrats are optimistic that young people will turn out in record numbers to support Obama, who has created a more extensive youth network than any other candidate in history. Students for Barack Obama has 700 chapters, each with a Facebook page where members can send messages, help organize events, or learn the time and location of the next door-knocking outing -- or "dorm storm," as they're known. The campaign also launched VoteforChange.com, where students can download registration forms, find out where to vote, learn about local speakers, and more.

And then there's MyBarackObama.com, a detailed organizing tool parked within the campaign's website, where individuals or groups can chart events attended or hosted, calls made, doors knocked, blogs posted, and money raised. There is a take-ownership element to Obama's efforts that has, for many young people, prompted a personal investment in his campaign's success.

"Turnout is a question mark, although the signs are positive," said Peter Levine, director of the nonpartisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "But the other thing is, we have this lopsided preference in this particular election, which hasn't been seen before." A USA Today/Gallup poll last month of voters age 18 to 29 showed Obama heavily favored -- 61 percent to 32 percent -- over Republican John McCain.

The online component of Obama's campaign -- and the rigorous battle with Clinton -- helped drive primary turnout to record levels. And political experts are buoyed by the fact that 6.5 million 18-to-29-year-olds cast ballots between January and June.

Burgeoning voter-registration rolls also suggest that young Americans are more eager to participate in this presidential election than in past ones. The Virginian-Pilot, for example, reported that 42 percent of new registrations in battleground Virginia this year were submitted by people age 24 or younger. Similarly, the Journal-Register news service said that nearly half of the 220,000 people who registered to vote in Connecticut this year were between 18 and 29.

All of this early activity -- and the increased political awareness that has accompanied it -- helped Kernan-Schloss and her counterparts reel young people into the process. Blond, wearing knee-high boots and jeans, and sporting a nose piercing, she is part of a small band of George Mason activists who have helped register some 2,000 new voters, by their count.

"We became known as the kids who were walking around campus," Kernan-Schloss said.

Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said that outreach by activists such as Kernan-Schloss is critical to their generation's follow-through come Election Day. "We do know [that] young people need to be mobilized," Keeter said. "They don't have habits. They don't have experience voting. They need to be asked."

The Obama campaign, far more than the McCain campaign, is asking and asking. Obama's Facebook page lists almost 2.3 million people as supporters. That's nearly quadruple McCain's number. And even young Republicans ramping up to help their nominee say that Obama's special efforts to reach young voters could pay off. "His campaign has certainly done a lot with new media to reach out to our generation," said Ashley Barbera, communications director of the College Republican National Committee and a first-year student at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law. "In sheer numbers, they do have greater strength."

Obama's camp is coy when asked for more specifics about how it intends to make a final push to get out the young vote. But Leigh Arsenault, Obama's youth vote director, said that the campaign's registration effort was critical to the ultimate success of its get-out-the-youth-vote efforts. Facebook, she added, "has been the ideal tool." (The Obama team hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes last year to help with online organization.)

Facebook has allowed young people to take the lead in many ways, Arsenault said. "It's not our campaign on the campuses," she said. "It's students'. They are active and involved and engaged."

The GOP is notably noncommittal when asked about efforts to win the hearts of the newest generation of voters. McCain's campaign did not respond to an interview request, and the Republican National Committee simply provided a list of websites that it believes illustrate its youth outreach, including MyGOP.com, the RNC's social network, which allows users to create an account to learn about volunteer opportunities. The site, which went live in January, is the party's answer to MyBarackObama.com.

But some Republicans have quietly expressed concern that the Left is innovating faster than the Right -- producing a gap that could prove costly now and in future elections. Obama, they say, hasn't just created a social-networking chat frenzy. He has built a database of e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers that could help his party keep younger voters in the Democratic fold for years to come.

"Organizationally, regaining our lead in technology is going to have to be the first priority, aside from repairing the brand, and doing what we obviously need to do to revamp our message and find good leaders," said GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini. "The Obama campaign has created something of a size and scale that hasn't been done before. And we're just going to have to play close attention to it. It really is a major challenge for the next four years."