youth vote

Young people care more about the environment — whether global warming, renewable fuels, clean energy or energy independence — than any other demographic. This proves true across party lines.

You know it’s not looking good for Sen. John McCain when the head of the University of Florida’s more than 1,000-strong “Gators for McCain” announced his resignation yesterday and said he had voted for Sen. Barack Obama.
According to The Independent Florida Alligator, the university’s daily student newspaper, Josh Simmons, chairman of the “Gators for McCain,” [...]

On Halloween, the Obama campaign uploaded another appeal targeting young voters on YouTube, this time starring Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
“You should be worried,” he tells college students, but “President Obama” would address key priorities for young voters, from renewing the economy to helping loan repayment for graduates who do public service. After Schmidt’s brief [...]

Here’s another reason to doubt the blizzard of polls that dominate political talk.
Pew, the respected non-partisan research organization, reports that polls that exclude cell phones may be a bit off — and effectively biased against Sen. Barack Obama. (H/T Michael Connery, and Mark Blumenthal has a good summary here.)

Sen. Barack Obama needs young voters to keep turning out at unusually high rates in order to win in November. While his campaign adeptly mobilized them in the primaries, and continues to empower young operatives in senior positions, the Democratic National Convention disappointed some youth advocates by under-using young people on stage, as I [...]

Sen. Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee largely because of unprecedented turnout by young voters in key primary states. (More data below.) Last week, walking around the speeches, panels and parties at the Democratic National Convention, it was clear that young voters are ascendant. Young people made up 16 percent of the delegates, a [...]