WASHINGTON — Myra King, who coordinated Students for Barack Obama at Loyola University in Chicago, put in long hours registering voters and canvassing neighborhoods as part of a nationwide campaign that targeted younger voters, drew overwhelming support and now offers potential for a new engagement with American youth.
Now it's transition time for a multitude of organizers who descended on college campuses this fall in an effort to get their peers to the polls. As their candidate prepares to take the oath of office, they are redirecting their attention to pressing for legislation on their issues. Their challenge: keeping the attention of an under-30 crowd of motivated voters into the next semester and beyond.
Barack Obama captured 66% of the vote among those under 30, exit polling showed, with only 31% voting for Republican nominee John McCain.
The Obama transition team already has moved to capitalize on this enormous youth base: Web-casting the president-elect's weekly addresses on YouTube; communicating its transition steps on a post-election website, Change.gov; and reaching out by e-mail to many of the campaign's 3 million donors amassed during a nearly two-year campaign.
The team also has taken advantage of booming social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, in reaching out to younger voters in their own element.
"I really enjoyed that during the campaign. . . . There were constant e-mails about what we can do," King, 19, said. "The Internet and Facebook is the way to keep in touch with our generation."
Experts say factors that contributed to increasing youth turnout at the polls will be key to continuing this engagement as an election season fades into governance.
"Obama forged a much different relationship with young voters than" Sen. John F. Kerry did in the 2004 campaign, said Scott Keeter, the Pew Research Center's director of survey research. "In terms of a separate force created from the grass-roots, the machinery for that is in place in a way that I don't think we've ever seen before."
In preventing younger voters from drifting away, one challenge for the new administration will be how well it lives up to its promises, Keeter says. Exit polls show that younger voters are eager for change on a variety of fronts that affect their lives -- healthcare, college costs and, as with the rest of the electorate, economic issues.
