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Carl M. Cannon

Aides to the upstart candidacy of the Democratic presidential nominee are convinced that youthful voters will put their man in the White House.

The campaign manager, tapping into his candidate's appeal among the young, urges 17-year-olds to attend Iowa's early caucuses -- where they upset the established order -- knowing that most of them will turn 18 by November, when they can vote in the general election.

"Elections will never be the same," another top adviser to the nominee adds. "The shape of the ballpark has changed, and so have the rules of the game."

And so, youth will be served, at long last. Or will it?

The anti-establishment Democratic candidate in the above example was not Barack Obama but George McGovern. (The campaign manager who pressed the advantage in Iowa was Gary Hart; the other political aide was Fred Dutton.) So, yes, liberals have been hoping for a tsunami of support from young voters for more than three decades. It didn't work out that way in 1972. McGovern carried one state, plus the District of Columbia, against Richard Nixon. The Republican incumbent, campaigning in the first year that 18-year-olds could vote, won every age bracket, and the chic practitioners of New Left politics learned that sometimes they couldn't trust anyone under 30 either.

Adding insult to liberalism's injury, the first time that young voters broke with their parents was in 1980. The youthful optimism of the nation's oldest presidential nominee (until now) galvanized young voters, who gravitated to Ronald Reagan and his party. After that, voting participation among the young declined and interest in them diminished.

But a wonderful aspect of politics is that things don't stay the same. And in 2004, a significant, if little-noticed, change occurred in the electorate: Participation among under-30 voters increased markedly and changed in ideological complexion. The John Kerry-John Edwards ticket won this age group by 9 percentage points, the only age cohort that Democrats carried.

This trend of young people voting, and voting Democratic, continued in 2006 -- just ask former Sens. George Allen of Virginia and Conrad Burns of Montana -- and if the polls are to be believed, it's about to happen again -- perhaps on a scale large enough to tip the result.

Last spring, Reader's Digest commissioned pollster John Della Volpe to probe the attitudes of young voters. He has been doing this under the auspices of Harvard's Institute of Politics for seven years. What Della Volpe learned was no surprise to him. First, the horse race gap between Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain was about 10 points. Judging by 2004, this is probably the generic difference now between Democrats and Republicans within this voting group. When Obama was paired against McCain, however, the Democratic lead was a stunning 23 points.

Recent IOP polls show that this trend has continued. It may be the key to the 2008 election. Once upon a time, it was too costly for campaigns to solicit young voters. Now, it isn't. They hang out in cyberspace, and it is incredibly inexpensive to target them online. Although both the Obama and McCain campaigns have done this, the evidence suggests that Obama has done it more effectively -- and is an easier sell to young people anyway.

This is the group to watch. Some evidence suggests that young people are underrepresented in today's horse race polls. They voted in the primaries -- and, yes, they helped Obama win in Iowa -- and they are giving Obama money and lobbying everyone from their friends to their parents to vote for him.

Numbering some 47 million strong, and in the midst of a historic surge of voting participation, Americans under 30 are ignored at the pundits' peril. So here's a prediction based on simple math: McCain will close that 23-point gap with young voters -- or he will lose.

Carl M. Cannon is a National Journal contributing editor

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