CONCORD, N.H (Jan. 5) — This election, the presidential contenders are looking for action from a special group of voters: the young.
“I feel like it’s more power to us,” said Joshua Sawyer, an 18-year-old from Northfield, N.H. “We’re the future of the nation.”
Nate Claggett, a 21-year-old from the Concord area planning to vote in the Republican primary, has noticed the candidates’ attention on young voters such as himself. “A lot of the various presidential candidates are targeting that group,” he said. “A lot of them are realizing that they are a large demographic.”
Young voters between the ages of 18 and 24 have been notorious for not turning out to vote. In the 2004 general elections, only 47 percent of that age group went to the polls, according to a study by CIRCLE, a research group at the University of Maryland. That compares to a turnout of 73 percent of those age 55 to 74.
But this year, the young are showing up to vote. In Iowa, for example 13 percent of all eligible Iowans under the age of 30 went to the state’s caucuses on Thursday. That’s more than triple the 4 percent of that age group who caucused in 2004.
And the candidates are using new tactics to reach those young voters. Many campaigns are reaching young voters through mediums such as videos on YouTube and Facebook social networking groups. Some are also using celebrities who appeal to the young.
Both winners of the Iowa caucuses, Democrat Barack Obama, senator from Illinois, and Republican Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, have used all those techniques.
Huckabee is using an endorsement by martial arts legend, Chuck Norris, to attract young people. A November campaign ad features Norris giving facts about Huckabee along side Huckabee telling “Chuck Norris facts” jokes. That’s an internet fad popular among high school and college students over the past couple years.
In the ad, Norris praises Huckabee’s support of the right to bear arms by telling viewers: “Mike Huckabee’s a life-long hunter who’ll protect our Second Amendment rights.”
In response, Huckabee quips: “There’s no chin behind Chuck Norris’s beard — only another fist.”
Adam Bungert, a volunteer for the Huckabee campaign, finds the ad popular with young people. “It gets them to look at Huckabee,” said Bungert.
Bungert, a sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, has been working to get young voters interested in Huckabee. In November, he organized a charity run on his school’s campus that Huckabee attended. Now, he works with the campaign to communicate with young people through online tools such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.
In Obama’s outreach to the young, one key tactic is to talk about college tuition. Obama proposed a $4,000 tuition tax credit in exchange for community service. He has attributed some of his success in Iowa to that kind of proposal.
“We talked to them about the things that they cared about, Obama said on Friday at a rally in New Hampshire at — where else? — a high school.
Among the high school students listening to Obama was sophomore Will Richmond. He is too young to vote but says he can’t wait to take his turn in the democratic process when he turns 18 in two years. He praised the candidate’s focus on his age group. “Things like this have really got younger people more interested,” said Richmond.
But not everyone is happy about the focus on the young. Ron and Marianne Williams, an elderly couple from Bethlehem, Pa., expressed surprise, for example, that Obama didn’t mention Social Security. They felt alienated by Obama’s speech, they said, with its close focus on the young.
“That’s good. You have to get them involved,” said Marianne Williams. “But I don’t think they should entirely forget about us.”
(Liam Migdail-Smith, a magazine journalism and political philosophy major, is covering the New Hampshire primaries for The Westerly Sun.)
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