What happened to Obama's youth movement juggernaut? (Feature)

By Anne K Walters Oct 15, 2010, 19:12 GMT

Villanova, Pennsylvania - Just two years ago, hoards of screaming students showed up at rallies around the country chanting 'Yes, we can' in support of Barack Obama's presidential bid.

This year, just as pivotal congressional elections on November 2 could hand control back to opposition Republicans, many of those young voters have lost faith in the president amid the faltering economy and fallen back into the political apathy long typical of younger voters.

In 2008, they took some of the credit for putting Obama into the White House, and the president is doing his best to woo them back: in recent weeks he has held a live MTV town hall forum and rallies at the University of Wisconsin and George Washington University.

'If you were excited in 2008, that was the beginning of the journey. That's not the end of the journey,' he told students at George Washington University in Washington.

But the question remains: is anybody listening?

'To be honest, he makes statements all the time,' said Addison Hunt, a 20-year-old mathematics student from Boston studying at Villanova University outside Philadelphia.

Students are wrapped up in their own worlds and less engaged than during the 2008 presidential race, she says: 'A lot more students supported (Obama's candidacy). Things were more unstable then.'

Many students wandering among the gray brick buildings on the suburban Philadelphia campus of 10,000 felt their peers were simply not attuned to the elections.

'Most people have no idea what's going on. Those who are political don't even know all the nitty gritty,' said Kelly McNeill, a nursing student who will be voting for the first time this year.

The hype around Obama's 2008 campaign drew in more young voters, she says, while studying with a friend between classes.

'Congress is not advertised to our age group,' McNeill notes. 'Maybe we're not their main audience.'

Members of college Democrat and Republican clubs rally for their parties, and some students have volunteered with local campaigns, students say, but most seemed more concerned with approaching mid- semester tests than the mid-term elections.

The atmosphere is a far cry from a presidential election, which typically draws a broader section of the electorate than the vote only for Congress, held in the middle of each four-year presidential term.

'Lots of people wore buttons and had stickers on their laptops,' economics student Joseph Martinez, 20, recalled from the 2008 election. He describes 'definitely less' political engagement among his peers in this election.

That could be partly because many students are registered to vote in their hometowns, rather than in the university towns where they study, often leaving them physically separated from both the congressional and local races that might help motivate turnout.

Even the logistics of voting create a hurdle: either planning ahead to request an absentee ballot from hometown election authorities or travelling home on election day. Students are free to vote in their university towns but must first take the simple but bureaucratic step of re-registering.

Statistics from youth voter advocacy group Rock the Vote show just 58 per cent of voters ages 18 to 29 are following this election. Fifty-nine per cent of young people say they are cynical about politics.

Enthusiasm has waned for Obama and his agenda, too, with a 56-per- cent favorability rating for the president among voters under 30, down from 73-per-cent approval from the same age group at the start of his term in January 2009.

Although their support has fallen, young voters do remain Obama's strongest age group. The latest Gallup Poll this week found Obama's job approval rate at 59 per cent among 18-29-year-olds, compared to his overall approval of 46 per cent and 38 per cent among respondents over 65.

Most young people still identify more with the centre-left Democrats, but they are less enthusiastic than their right-leaning peers, the Rock the Vote poll showed.

Younger Republicans are more likely to be excited about the election than young Democrats - just as older Republicans are more motivated than their Democratic peers - as the conservative party rides a wave of anti-government sentiment and sees a chance to capture majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Even in the relatively friendly setting of an MTV studio on Thursday, Obama received questions from a young Republican about why he had not done more to boost bipartisanship and why he should receive votes when he comes up for reelection if the economy does not improve over the next two years.

'We're all Americans, we all want to make sure that the economy is strong, people don't get bankrupt when they get sick and that young people can afford an education,' Obama told the audience, sticking largely to the themes he touts with older audiences.

'We've got to stop the name calling and stop looking just at the next election and figure out what we are going to do for the next generation.'

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