Jon Henke at The Next Right explores whether the young vote helped propel Barack Obama to victory in this year’s election.  His conclusion is as follows:

[H]igher margin of victory among young voters could tell us one of two things.

1. The wave was a myth: The youth vote was the same, but they swung to Obama.  The composition changed by persuasion.
2. The wave was a reality: The youth vote likely to vote for McCain stayed home, while a wave of new young voters turned out for Obama.  The composition changed by differences in enthusiasm, ground game and coalition expansion.

If #2 is correct, it implies these Obama voters are not persuadable swing voters, but a new generation of likely Democratic voters.

As a member of the “youth vote,” I would like to delve into this discussion a bit more by focusing on Jon’s second point.  Even if “the wave was a reality,” I’m not convinced that these voters represent a new generation of Democrats.  Speaking to my peers on both sides of the aisle, the prevailing mindset that I heard going into Election Day was disgust with the Bush administration and the Republican Party.  As a result, Obama’s clear-cut messages of “hope” and “change” had an incredibly powerful appeal to my peers, and so they pulled the lever for Obama – and in turn, as Patrick Ruffini points out, for the rest of the Democratic ticket.

Therefore, even if Jon’s #2 option is correct, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these young voters are going to be life-long Democrats, or even that they will continue pulling the Democratic lever in the short-term.  As I mentioned earlier, my peers went into this election full of frustration and perhaps even anger, and so they coalesced around the man who stood in stark contrast to everything that left them so upset.  Thus, it is quite possible that they turned out in droves to vote for the Democratic ticket, led by Barack Obama, out of disgust with the current state of the nation rather than as a new generation of Democrats.

Indeed, my experience from talking to my peers on both the Left and the Right is that they are, overall, considerably more libertarian than other generations.  They want the government involved in their lives as little as possible.  Yes, this means that they are opposed to banning gay marriage and perhaps even in support of decriminalization of marijuana.  But it also means that they agree with the Republican Party on the core issues of reducing the size of the government, cutting government spending, and putting taxpayer’s money back in their own hands.

Of course, this begs the question: then why did these voters vote for Obama?  They didn’t necessarily vote for him because they felt that he could pave the way to a more libertarian country, but rather because the Republican Party, led by President George W. Bush, had many chances to fulfill its promises of reduced government but failed miserably.

I certainly do not believe that we have irrevocably lost a generation of young voters to the Democratic Party.  Nonetheless, we are going to have to fight to win back this crucial voting bloc in 2010 and beyond – and this is going to mean rethinking the Republican Party’s platform.  However, if we want to get the Republican Party back on the right track, winning over the youth vote is an absolute necessity.

For your reading pleasure: Part 2 and Part 3 of my “Winning Back the Youth Vote” pieces.

Last 5 posts by Aaron Marks

• Onward and Upward: Building a Sustainable Majority - January 22nd, 2010
• Dear Young Voters: This Is What You Get When You Don't Vote - December 1st, 2009
• The Youth Vote and the 2009 Elections - November 6th, 2009
• The Best of the Post-2009 Election Spin - November 5th, 2009
• Introducing NextGenGOP Executive Director James Kane - October 20th, 2009