Young Americans are changing politics-as-usual. And they also might bring the Democrats back to the White House.

They are the .Net Generation: the 44 million Americans under the age of 29 who grew up with the Internet and keep in touch through Facebook. Their most valuable property is their laptop, and they consider text messaging as normal as making a phone call.
They have already changed how political campaigns are conducted. Now there’s a good chance they will pick the next president.
Since the 1972 election, when the voting age was lowered to 18, the only records set by younger voters have been for political apathy. The low point was in 1996, when only 35 percent of eligible voters under 30 went to the polls.
That started to change in the 2000 election, and by 2004, turnout among the demographic was up to 47 percent.
“Most other segments of the electorate either stayed flat or went up a point or two. But we had this surge among young people in 2004,” said John Della Volpe, who has been tracking the youth vote since 2000 as director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School for Government and as founder of SocialSphere Strategies, a consulting firm dedicated to Web 2.0 strategy.

Watch as young people describe what issue drives their political opinions and votes.

“It is very likely that more votes in [the 2008] election will be cast by people under 30 than over 65,” Della Volpe explained. “This was the case in 2004, and they are even more tuned in this year. Millennials—who account for about one-fifth of all voters—are now one of the most significant voting blocs.”
Della Volpe attributed the change in civic participation of young people to 9/11. “Young people were active in the community, not in politics. After 9/11, their political attitudes shifted,” he explained.
Young people, who have grown up watching events like the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the debacle of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have discovered that even if they could affect change by working in soup kitchens or homeless shelters, it was the people running the country who had the real impact on their lives.

Watch as young people describe how and in what way they are getting involved in the campaigns.

Donald Green, a Yale professor and author of Get Out to Vote, thinks the attitudes of young voters shifted as a result of the intense mobilization of voters in battleground states in 2004. That year, the Bush and Kerry campaigns focused on mobilizing core supporters rather than on broader “get out and vote” efforts. Because of their historically low voting rates, young voters were specifically targeted.
“In 2004, young voters were seen as a goldmine of votes,” Green said. “That was a turning point in youth turnout.”
That trend toward greater turnout has continued during the 2008 primaries and caucuses. Through the end of March, younger voters had accounted for 15 percent of the Democratic electorate and 11 percent of Republican voters. In 2000, they had represented only 10 percent of the Democratic Party primaries and caucuses.
So far in the primaries, the Democratic Party has seen a 109 percent increase in the youth vote compared with 2003, according to Lauren Wolfe, co-president of the College Democrats of America, a branch of the Democratic National Committee.
For example, approximately 700,000 young people voted in the past Democratic primary, which was an increase of 341,000 over 2004. In Maryland alone, turnout increased from 38,000 voters under 29 years old to 104,000.

Watch as young people talk about what turns them on about the candidate that they are planning to vote for, and what issues led them to make their decisions.

The Impact of Web 2.0
The impact of increased voting by the under-30 set has been magnified by the emergence of YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, as well as by the increased use of text messaging.
These new technologies have made it easier and less expensive for political parties to reach voters. Texting, for example, is not only cheaper than sending direct mail or cold calling, but it has also proven more effective in reaching the younger voters.
In addition, young voters are enthusiastically using these new technologies to mobilize their own friends, as well as to spread good—and bad—information about candidates.

From FDR’s “Fireside Chats” to the invention of the Internet, our interactive graphic lays out how burgeoning technologies have changed the way Americans do politics.

Online social networking is almost tailor-made for promoting political activism. Since these sites are designed to promote a sense of community among users, it is easy to encourage “friends” to vote or work for a particular candidate. In essence, it has become the more efficient digital equivalent to knocking on neighbors’ doors.
Political scientists Christine Williams and Girish Gulati recently published a study that demonstrated how powerful Facebook’s impact was during the 2006 mid-term elections. Simply put, the more Facebook supporters a candidate had, the more votes he ended up getting.
And what worked in 2006 is working even better in 2008. This same study demonstrated that there was a very close relationship between the number of Facebook supporters each Democratic candidate had and the number of delegates he or she won in the Iowa caucus. And in New Hampshire, Facebook support accurately predicted how young voters cast their ballots.
Politicians have gotten the message. Today, Obama has 755,659 Facebook friends, while Clinton has 144,149. McCain, with only 107,887, has been slower to adopt the new technology, and—not surprisingly—has generated demonstrably less support among young voters.
These sites also play a big role in creating a viral effect to whatever happens on the campaign trail. Almost 3.5 million people saw the Rev. Jeremiah Wright video on YouTube, and more than 5.5 million watched Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, which effectively staunched much of the criticism about what Rev. Wright had to say.
And Clinton’s less-than-dangerous landing in Bosnia became an instant YouTube hit—and a pressing problem for her campaign—when more than 2 million people bypassed the traditional media and took a look for themselves.
Of course, TV still matters to politics and to young people. According to the January Pew study titled “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008,” six out of ten people under 29 get their political news from TV.
What’s new, however, is what they do with it. Today, a young person might see something on cable TV, post it on a Facebook page and forward it to hundreds of friends.
For other generations, digesting the media is a passive activity.

Who wins the YouTube vote? Does Oprah, Brittney or Barack garner the most hits on the infamous video site?

Counting on the Campus
A few months ago, Chris Huether, a 21-year-old student at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and the president of the local College Republicans, helped register prospective Republican voters on his campus.
His group regularly uses Facebook to convince students that McCain is best qualified to be commander in chief and said the group is also “big into sending click emails.”
“Kids come to college and a lot of times don’t realize they can change the state where they vote,” said Huether. He wants to make sure they register, at least if they are McCain supporters.
Chris Addy, secretary of Lehigh’s College Democrats, said his group, Students for Obama, went dorm-to-dorm encouraging prospective voters to register. That activism is now being poured into getting voters out for the April 22 Pennsylvania Primary. “We just kind of step back and let the campaigns do what they do and assist in any way we can,” he said.
That humility belies the impact young activists like Huether and Addy are having. Young voters have been a core part of Obama’s support network and a big part of his success, which clearly surprised both the Clinton campaign and the political establishment. If young voters had not come out to vote in record numbers, Clinton would probably already be crafting her convention acceptance speech.
However, the biggest impact is probably yet to come. According to a Gallup Poll conducted late last month, substantial Obama and Clinton majorities among voters under 30 are the only factors keeping them within striking distance of McCain.
Gallup’s latest numbers show that McCain would beat Obama by 1.3 percent and Clinton by 1 percent of the total vote, both of which are within the margin of error. But Obama would beat McCain by 20 percent among young voters, while Clinton’s edge is 12 percent. According to the poll, McCain would win every other demographic.
The question, of course, is whether the Democrats can count on young people to actually vote in November. “We have seen a fantastic turnout in young people, and we expect to see even more in November,” said Lauren Wolfe of the Democratic National Committee.
If they do, they will make history.