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.

Advice to the spouses of Republican legislators: Get some Xanax.  If your spouse refuses to take it, keep it for yourself.  And plenty of Tylenol.  Maybe arrange for daily massages, for both of you; that might help.  Above all, don’t let yourself run out of Jim Beam.  It’s going to be a rough … eternity. 

The signs of Republicans tanking are everywhere.  The once mighty 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain, has fallen.  By March of this year, he was polling at only 14.4 percent among Republican voters in Iowa.  Now it’s 1.8 percent.  Even Fred Thompson is getting 5.2 percent support.  But that’s not the bad news.  The bad news is that Obama is outpolling both of them AMONG REPUBLICANS with 6.7 percent. 

All right, so McCain’s an eyelash above nothing.  So what?  Romney, on the other hand, has gone from 11 percent in March to 21.8 percent.  If McCain’s figures go down, all that means is that somebody else’s go up, right?  Yes … sort of.

Except that the entire Republican field is such a stinking disappointment that only 36 percent of Republican voters are happy with their choices (compared to 61 percent of Democrats pleased with theirs).  And the GOP candidates are all crowded so far to the right that Democrats should be able to swing, not only the independents. but also the moderate Republicans.

No wonder that 40 percent of Republicans figure the Dems are going to win the presidency (compared to 12 percent of Dems who think the reverse).

It’s looking bad for the GOP in ’08.  But the really bleak news is beyond that. Republicans had Congress for twelve years and the whole shootin’ match for six.  They’ve produced the worst foreign policy debacle in our history, spent so much money that they made drunken sailors look fiscally responsible, put incompetents in charge of every federal agency, institutionalized corruption, and bestowed the treasury on the wealthy by granting them tax cuts and no bid contracts. 

People are starting to notice.

Registered Democrats and Democratic-leaners are now 50% of the population, while registered Republicans and Republican-leaners only comprise 35%–a strong swing from an equal 43%-43% tie in 2002.

Nor is that trend likely to reverse itself anytime soon.  One reason is that the youth vote has risen markedly in the last two elections.  At Yearly Kos, Howard Dean pointed out that that vote was up 20 percent in 2006 (from the previous off year elections in ’02) and that 61 percent of those between 18 and 29 voted for Democrats.

If the past is any guide, a young person who votes three times or more before turning thirty is likely to vote regularly all his life.  And if he votes for the same party those three times, he’ll probably vote for them all his life.

Republicans have alienated the youth of America these past six years and will pay for that mistake for the next sixty years.

So, in addition to Xanax, Tylenol, massages, and Jim Beam, spouses?  Better lay in a supply of Pepto Bismol.