Since pollsters ring only landlines, who knows how much the polling for this election might be off, because the cell-phone-only segment of the electorate is also the fastest growing segment of the electorate: the youth vote. Used to be that pollsters didn’t need to worry much about what the youth thought because they didn’t vote all that much anyway.
Yeah, well, this ain’t your fifties youth vote.
18-29 year olds have voted in increasingly large numbers since 2004, motivated in part by worries about the economy (41 percent list it as their top concern). And they skew heavily in Obama’s direction: 56 percent for Obama to 29 percent for McCain. That’s coming up toward a 2 to 1 advantage for Barack.
The Obama campaign in Missouri is busting butt to get those young people to the polls this November, but what a job. A huge percentage of them live on campus and because they’re at a new address, they aren’t registered. So the campaign has designated four full time staff members (in St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Joe) to focus exclusively on that demographic. They’ve got organizations on 36 college campuses and 50 high school campuses.
Top speakers have been brought in to motivate the student activists. I wrote about Howard Dean’s visit to St. Louis University last month. In addition, Madeleine Albright spoke to activists at UMKC, and Don Cheadle revved up students at UMSL and at Penn Valley Community College College in KC.
Student activists, besides roving around their dorm buildings offering to get students registered, have so far had two Days of Action. The second one was last Thursday, when they waited outside classrooms as classes ended and in student unions, offering to register any students who weren’t yet on the voter rolls.
The latest poll in Missouri has Obama at 49 and McCain at 48. But I can’t help wondering whether or hoping that Obama’s lead is actually larger because the pollsters can’t get to all those sophomores in Dorm Building B who only have cell phones.