Appetite for change draws young voters to the polls

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For more than three decades, it was the hollowest of presidential campaign promises: "And we're going to get out the youth vote!" Yeah, right. Politicians rarely talked about the issues that mattered to young people, and the under-30 crowd returned the favor by not voting.Young people did show up four years ago -- to vote against George W. Bush. But last week, they showed up in record numbers to vote for somebody, helping to propel Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois to victory in the Iowa Democratic caucuses.They showed that appealing to the under-30 vote doesn't have to be a hollow promise for candidates who know how to translate their online love into real-world votes.The number of under-30 Iowa caucusgoers tripled compared with 2004 , and more than 57 percent of young Democratic voters supported Obama. Exit polls found 22 percent of the nearly 239,000 Democratic voters were under 30. The GOP caucus winner, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, snagged 40 percent of the Republican youth vote, according to an MSNBC exit poll, roughly double his closest competitor. However, only 11 percent of the GOP's estimated 116,000 caucus voters were under 30; 38 percent were over 60.The Obama campaign "had a candidate who spoke to the issues that mattered to young people and they combined online outreach with on-the-ground, in-person contact," said Kat Barr, education director for the nonpartisan Rock the Vote and a nationally recognized youth-voter expert who was in Iowa for the caucuses.Part of the reason for the young-voter boom is that both Obama and Huckabee "are considered unorthodox from others running from their parties," said John Green, a professor of political science at the University of Akron in Ohio and a fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.But what's driving the overall youth vote is that young people now have social networking tools -- like Facebook and MySpace -- that make it easy for them to get involved and connect creatively with others about political issues. And it is easy for the campaigns to contact them.Obama's campaign had three times the number of Facebook supporters (more than 182,000) as his nearest Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and also dominated his competitors in terms of friends on MySpace. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas has the most online support among GOP candidates, and attracted 21 percent of the under-30 vote in Iowa; however, he garnered single-digit support among those over 30.The most successful campaigns understand that it's not enough for their candidate to have a lot of Facebook groups linked to their name; the campaign has to connect with those supporters online and get them to do real-world work.Obama's campaign -- among others -- did.And now, after years of hearing that a campaign that banked heavily on youth support wouldn't be successful, Obama's Iowa win is opening some eyes in California."It was a huge, huge boost of confidence to see that young voters in Iowa literally won the election for Obama," said Menno Goedman, Obama's 22-year-old director of student outreach in California. "From a recruiting standpoint, it makes his candidacy much more real to people. You can say he's the youth candidate and people will go, 'Yeah, yeah.' But now they can see it."Obama's California campaign is following the same blueprint as its Iowa counterpart in linking online and offline experiences. When someone joins an Obama-related group on Facebook, for example, a campaign volunteer will connect with them online, then ask for their phone number."Then when you call that person, you have a common ground to talk to them about something," said Goedman, who graduated last year from the University of California-San Diego. The campaign worker invites the online supporter to come to an event or help at an Obama-related gathering."It's one thing to get somebody to sign an online pledge saying, 'I'll vote for Obama.' But it's another to look them in the eye and get that same promise," Goedman said.Several studies completed after the 2004 election found that the most successful way to convince young voters was to talk to them face to face, Barr said.(E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli(at)sfchronicle.com) (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)