Will Young People Doom Barack Obama?

Posted by Oliver Willis at 12:00 PM on October 1, 2007.

This post, written by Oliver Willis, originally appeared pn Like Kryptonite To Stupid

So many campaigns in the last twenty years were supposed to be the ones that finally expressed the will of young people, except that when it comes time to do actual work and actual voting, the majority of the young fail time and time again. Last cycle it was the groundswell of support behind Howard Dean that never appeared at the polls in Iowa, and this cycle it looks like Sen. Barack Obama is on pace to get screwed by the youth vote that doesn't show up.

The campaign's challenge will be converting the excitement of Kizzie and other students into votes. Candidates who have charmed young voters in the past have largely failed when it came to mobilizing them. Interviews with two dozen students as they went back to school at three black colleges found support for Obama, but with summer breaks having ended only recently, the campaign's fledgling student organizations do not match the enthusiasm.

About 18 students showed up for the first meeting of Students for Barack Obama at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta. The group's volunteer coordinator Kevin Heard, 19, was disappointed with the showing.

"We have to get more people here," he said. He joined the group, Heard said, because it offers an opportunity "to help a black man who is showing positive images of African American men. By helping someone as positive as he is, I'll show America that I am positive, too."

He and others in the group will head to South Carolina this weekend to knock on doors for the candidate.

More representative of the overall level of student activism is Troy Haynes, 21. A Clark Atlanta student who recently moved from New York, he has never cast a vote and is barely paying attention to the presidential race. He did sign onto a Students for Barack Obama group on Facebook, because he thinks that "Obama should show the whole world that a black man can run the United States."

Has Haynes registered to vote? "Nah, not yet."

I sense that a lot of people think signing up for an Obama Facebook group and plugging him on their MySpace page will be all it takes, but I feel that at the same time Clinton's got older supporters actually doing stuff in the real world and that will actually translate to votes.

Tagged as: youth, obama, election08, democratic party, iowa

Oliver Willis is the blogmaster at Like Kryptonite To Stupid