Younger voters are divided almost evenly between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, recent polls show, contradicting many pundits’ predictions that the youth vote will be overwhelmingly Democratic.
“In some surveys, we have seen it heavily toward Kerry, but in others, it’s pretty close,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “Young voters aren’t so one-way; we have seen a fair amount of back and forth in their opinions.”
This indicates that young voters are “are conflicted about the choice,” Mr. Kohut said. “They’re unhappy with President Bush in some ways; but they remain, many of them, very uncomfortable with Senator Kerry.”
The latest Zogby poll, taken Oct. 25 to 27, found 47 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they’d vote for Mr. Bush and 49 percent said they’d vote for Mr. Kerry. A survey by Pew Research Center taken Oct. 15 to 19 found that 44 percent of that same age group supported Mr. Bush and 47 percent supported Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Such dead-heat results reflect a loss of youth support for Mr. Kerry. A month earlier, the Pew poll had Mr. Kerry leading 53 percent to 35 percent among voters who are younger than 30.
“For Kerry to lose that sort of advantage is a pretty big surprise,” said Republican pollster John McHenry.
Other polls continue to indicate an overwhelming margin among youth for Mr. Kerry, including a Harvard survey that found the Democrat leading 52 percent to 39 percent among college students.
Still, Adam Alexander, spokesman for the nonpartisan voter-registration effort New Voters Project, said it’s “totally erroneous” to assume that the majority of young people will vote Democrat.
“They’re very much up for grabs, and the candidate who does the best job reaching out to them wins,” said Mr. Alexander, whose group has registered 350,000 new 18- to 24-year-old voters in six states — Colorado, Wisconsin, Oregon, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada.
After the 26th Amendment was ratified in 1971, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, it was widely predicted that the newly enfranchised youth vote would rally behind Democrat George McGovern, who opposed the Vietnam War. But after the election, pollsters reported that a majority of young voters had chosen President Nixon, who won re-election in a landslide.
The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) reports that the partisan orientation of young voters has changed several times in recent decades.
About 60 percent of voters younger than 30 voted to re-elect President Reagan in 1984, according to CIRCLE, and George H.W. Bush got a majority of younger voters in 1988.
In 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot got more than 20 percent of the 30-and-younger vote, and in 1996, more than 50 percent of them voted to re-elect President Clinton — the only time a Democrat has won a majority of younger voters since Jimmy Carter did it in 1976, according to CIRCLE.
Josh Earnest, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Kerry supporters are confident that their candidate will win the youth vote.
“Turning them out is an important part of our effort over the last five days before Election Day,” he said.
Both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush have mounted special appeals to younger voters. Mr. Kerry went on Comedy Central’s popular “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in August, and the Bush campaign has a section on its Web site called “Barbara and Jenna’s Journal,” which details the first daughters’ campaign experiences.
The Democratic National Committee has recently placed Kerry ads on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and other youth-heavy shows, Mr. Alexander said, while College Republicans — which registered as a 527 group this year to be able to raise more unregulated money — has raised $10 million to mobilize young voters in swing states.
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