It will be a close presidential election in November, according to most observers and polls. Calculations are being made about how various electoral blocs will vote for the two major candidates -- women, Hispanics, urban residents, rural voters, or Arab-American voters.
There are about nine million four-year college students in the United States. This is a group as large as some of the other voting blocs that have gotten a lot of attention. So it seems as though we should be looking at college students as an important bloc of voters in the November election.
Here are a few facts. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report based on data from the 2011 Current Population Study, in October 2011 there were about 38.3 million individuals in the United States population between 16 and 24, and there were 12.8 million individuals enrolled in college in this age group, with 9.1 million enrolled in four-year colleges. According to a Harvard survey conducted by the Institute of Politics, 74 percent of college students indicated in spring 2012 that they were registered to vote, and when asked for party inclination they responded 40 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 31 percent Independent. Seventy-four percent of college students responded that they were "definitely or probably" going to vote in the 2012 presidential election. Tea Party support was low at 11 percent while support for the Occupy movement was greater at 20 percent. (This poll was administered during the Republican primary process.) Interestingly enough, 46 percent indicated they expected President Obama to win reelection, with only 29 percent expecting that he would not be reelected. (The survey also finds that 89 percent of college students have a Facebook account and 33 percent of them have a Twitter account.)
A summary analysis of the generation gap provided by the Pew Research Center in September 2011 provides some very striking data. The report finds that "in the last four national elections, generational differences have mattered more than they have in decades." The report compares young people (18-29) with older people (65+) and finds that these two groups were roughly similar in their voting preferences in 2000 and 2002. But the two groups were moving in opposite directions, with the younger group becoming much more solidly Democratic and the older group becoming more solidly Republican. The Millennials, born in 1981 to 1993, represent 17 percent of registered voters in the United States; they are the most diverse generation; they have liberal views on many social issues; and they voted for President Obama by a two-to-one margin in 2008. Overall this poll conducted in September 2011 indicates that young people (18-29) favor Obama over Romney by 26 points. In this period of time, anyway, college students have become significantly more liberal than the electorate as a whole.
So this group of Americans is large, engaged, and has some distinct political preferences. This cohort is more comfortable with racial diversity, it is more supportive of gay rights, and it is supportive of women's reproductive rights.
Why are young voters proving to be so different from other generations of Americans? It is hard to disentangle the various influences that come to bear on the political identity of a generation. But it seems that the generation gap documented in the Pew study has more to do with the cohort as a whole and less to do with the experience of college. The Institute of Politics study mentioned above provides comparative statistics for the cohort as a whole and the four-year college segment of that cohort. College students appear to be slightly more liberal than their non-college contemporaries; for example, 40 percent of college respondents indicate they are "liberal" in comparison to 36 percent of the cohort as a whole. Thirty-five percent of college students indicate they are "conservative," which is exactly the same percentage as the cohort as a whole. These are not large differences between college students and non-college students of the same generation. So the generation gap the Pew Research Center study identifies seems to have to do more with the circumstances of the whole cohort, not just the college-attending group. And this implies that the society that this generation of young people has experienced since the 1980s has provided them with values that are quite different from those of their parents -- more tolerant and more progressive.
All of this makes it seem that the youth vote will be critical for President Obama. His political message and his personal style seem to be very resonant with the values the Millennial generation has come to embrace. So it will be important for the president to spend time and effort in mobilizing these voters in November.