By Andrew MacRae

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2007 – A generation after teenagers were first granted the right to vote on July 1, 1971, 18- to 21-year olds are poised to make a greater contribution to the 2008 election campaign than ever before.

Youth participation has been dramatically increasing over the course of the last few election cycles, officials said at "The Future of Political Communications – Connecting with Young Voters," a conference sponsored last week by Young Voter Strategies (YVS), an George Washington University non-profit organization that studies trends of youth participation.

Voting isn't the only way these youth differ from previous generations: they are also more ethnically diverse, ideologically extreme and tend to vote more for the Democratic Party, according to YVS.

Campaigns are increasingly taking notice of these differences, and hoping to engage these potential voters. Josh Orton, deputy director of new media for the Barack Obama campaign, stated that his goal was to "increase the access points for young people, while increasing expectations of their participation."

Other panelists from the Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns agreed that they are trying to engage youth where they live, and for the so-called "millennial generations," that is increasingly on the Internet, at sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

When 18- to 21-year olds first got the right to vote, the draft for Vietnam and the civil rights movement were in the political foreground. The youth voting block seemed likely to promptly begin exercising political power.

That never happened. Voter turnout for that age-group has remained consistently the lowest of any other age group.

But voter turnout among 18- to 24-year olds increased 11 percent from the 2000 to the 2004 presidential elections. That's almost triple the average increase in turnout of all other age groups: 4 percent, according to a study conducted Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement.

This may be connected to the increasing congruence between politics and the Internet, and also between the Internet and the college-aged. From John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign to Howard Dean's in 2004 to everyone's today, the Internet has become the primary tool for organizing, fundraising, and communicating. It seems that campaigns are finally reaching out to potential voters in a dramatically different environment — online.

Joe Trippi, media team and senior advisor for John Edwards, likened today's emergence of the Internet over television to the way television superceeded radio in the 1960 presidential campaign. Trippi expects to see changes in both the types of candidates running for office as well as voters' expectations of those candidates. It is now no longer good enough to be to be on camera for a 30-second broadcast, he said.

The interactive Internet makes the traditional broadcast media seem boorishly-outdated.

Nothing at the conference demonstrated this dichotomy more than the panel discussions. When asked for an example of an "interesting exercise of power via their product," the representative from another conference sponsor Comcast touted the cable provider's video-on-demand service. It provides short, basic video clips on presidential candidates for people who pay extra for the service. At the same time:

Facebook cited a voter registration drive that focused on college campuses in collaboration with some 15 other organizations. The drive became the most successful mid-term youth effort in history and netted over 540,000 youth voters.

MySpace cited the "burrito project," a informal grassroots effort utilizing MySpace to feed the homeless in America. It eventually spawned an international progeny called the "falafel project," which provides food to Syria's homeless.

YouTube cited the citizen journalism of a popular user dubbed "Emergency Cheese." He has begun a public dialogue with many presidential candidates, and has even managed to interview presidential hopefuls including Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark. as well as former Sen. Mike Gravel, D-Alaska, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas - from his dorm room at Georgetown University.

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