June 27, 2007
Young Voters Could Be Boon To Democrats In '08
The good news for Democrats is that, according to a new poll of Americans aged 17 through 29, young people have already taken a relatively strong interest in the 2008 presidential election, and they appear to be most pumped about the Democratic Party's early front-runners.
The bad news? Democrats have been down this road before, and it didn't end well.
In 2004, Democratic nominee John Kerry was the choice of a majority of voters under 30, but even though over a million new young adult voters registered that year, it was still not enough to push Kerry over the top.
Still, a new CBS News/MTV/New York Times poll [PDF] of the youngest American voting bloc suggests there is potential for the Democratic candidates in 2008, should they succeed in tapping into it. Fifty-four percent of young people polled said they'd be voting Democratic if the election were held today, compared with 32 percent who said they'd choose the GOP nominee.
And while a 45-percent plurality of respondents weren't jazzed about any of the options currently on the table, the two candidates who garnered the most enthusiasm were Barack Obama (18 percent) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (17 percent), followed by GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani in a distant third (4 percent).
See today's Poll Track (subscription) for more on the CBS/MTV/Times survey of young Americans.
