Young Voter Enthusiasm for Romney High While Young Support for Obama Declines

Young US voters back President Obama by a slimmer margin than they did in the presidential election of 2008. At the same time, a surge in enthusiasm can be seen among young voters who support Republican challenger Mitt Romney. This is according to a poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at President Obama’s alma mater, Harvard University.

Among likely voters under the age of thirty, Obama leads Romney fifty-five percent to thirty-six percent. But, in the 2008 presidential election, young voters favored Obama over McCain fixty-eight percent to thirty-three percent.

In 2008, Obama surpassed his opponent in obtaining the youth vote by thirty-four percentage points.  

Currently, Obama leads Romney, among the young, by only twenty-five percentage points. The youth vote, in the 2008 election, was key to the president’s win.

Romney has the advantage when it comes to young voter enthusiasm. The Harvard poll demonstrates that enthusiam among these newest members of the electorate is higher for Romney than for Obama. Sixty-five percent of Romney’s young supporters said they will “definitely” vote in the November 6 election, compared with fifty-five percent of Obama’s supporters who said they would “definitely” show at the polls.

The poll encompassed voters ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-four and revealed that enthusiam overall is declining, within a group that has historically had a lower level of enthusiasm than the general electorate. “As enthusiasm for voting continues to slip among America’s eighteen to twenty-nine year olds, the IOP’s latest poll shows a clear sentiment by young adults that Washington is broken,” Trey Grayson, director of the Institute of Politics, explained in a statement.

Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, however, had an adverse effect on the Republican ticket. According to the survey, nine percent of the young respondents said that Ryan’s addition to the ticket made them “much more likely” to vote for Romney, but forty percent said adding Ryan made them “much less likely” to lend their support to Romney.

Harvard’s poll was conducted by surveying 2,123 U.S. citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, was carried out between September 19 and October 3 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.