MCT Wire Stories
Though their negative tactics have driven off some “undecideds,” both candidates are still desperately trying to woo voters from Florida and the nation’s universities.
As a result, Florida’s college voters are naturally a prime target.
With Florida’s critical cache of 27 electoral votes, polls show Obama with a 2- to 7-point lead in the Sunshine State, which George W. Bush won twice. The candidates or their running mates have been in Florida virtually every day for weeks.
While some UT students don’t know or don’t care about the election and negative campaigning has turned off others, this is not the case on other campuses, many of which are excited about Obama.
This year Democrats have mounted a half-million-voter edge in registrations, with much of the boost coming from campus drives.
At USF, volunteers are shuttling students to a polling place in the “Yes We Van,” provided by the sale of Barack Obama T-shirts.
“The youth need to get off the couch, stop eating Cheetos and get to the polls. We need to vote for change,” said Matt Jocke, a 19-year-old USF student.
For University of Central Florida student Joe Martino, president of the Florida College Democrats, this election is beyond his lifetime.
“There is an excitement going on in my campus that I’ve never seen before,” he said.
Martino said students are ignited by their anger with the Bush administration, the message of change and the attention the Obama campaign has paid to students.
“It’s almost a perfect storm of things,” he said.
His Orlando campus registered 10,000 people. And he spent much of the week rounding them up six at a time to place in a van on the way to the polling place. He has been manning booths, handing out T-shirts, lining up speakers and working with the Obama campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort.
“I definitely believe the youth vote is going to help him carry Florida or I wouldn’t be up so late every night and up so early every morning,” Martino said. “This year is so much different.”
“Generational Duel”
For the first time in Florida, voters 34 and younger outnumber those 65 and older, leaving some pollsters saying Florida could come down to whether the reliable GOP seniors will be offset by the turbo-charged but flighty habits of youth. Traditionally, the young don’t vote and the seniors do.
Through texting, Facebook and student volunteers, the Obama campaign has dug deep into the youth culture. And nowhere is the Obama machine betting on college-age voters more than in Florida.
“It has the potential of being a generational duel,” said Susan A. McManus, a USF political science professor who studies age and voting patterns.
What seems different this time is that younger voters appear “considerably more cohesive” and that the Obama camp is literally driving first-time voters to the polls, McManus said.
But whether students can rival the voting strength of their elders “is still a big guess,” she said.
Part of the equation is that neither the young nor the old are monolithic. Registration data show that older residents are just as likely to be Democrats as Republicans. And the University of Florida in Gainesville has one of the largest McCain student groups in the country, boasting 1,000 members.
Christy Hoppe of The Dallas Morning News and a Staff Editorial by The Chicago Tribune (MCT).
