(En route from DC to Boston) in lieu of a substantive post today, I’m just going to link to CIRCLE’s New Hampshire youth vote analysis. Exclusive from CIRCLE is an estimate that youth turnout was 15% in the primary. That’s not too great (as the following chart shows), but one reason is surely the lack of a contested Democratic primary. Missing a whole party will always lower turnout–and young voters lean Democratic in states like New Hampshire.

Republicans have opportunities with young people and should aim to attract more of them than John McCain did in ’08–but they are starting far behind. Ron Paul continues to attract substantial youth support, but it may not translate to the eventual Republican nominee; besides, his numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire are far behind Obama’s in 2008. In fact, Obama got nearly as many young votes in ’08 as the whole Republican field received yesterday.

(Atlanta) While I am here for meetings on state standards, CIRCLE has been churning out press releases related to youth voting in the primaries and caucuses (and getting a fair amount of coverage). Notwithstanding my recent critique of horse-race campaign coverage, we do try to provide solid and timely information about young voters–to set the record straight and to help young people draw attention that may translate into political importance.

So far, I think these are some of the highlights:

Youth turnout in Iowa was just 4%, but that’s rather typical of the Caucuses. The outlier year was 2008. It helped that youth could vote in either the Democratic or Republican Caucuses in ’08, but Barack Obama’s 30,000+ young voters pushed it to record-setting heights.

This year, although not a huge number of young Iowans participated, they concentrated their votes for Ron Paul (who drew 48%: far more than anyone else), thereby affecting the result. If you subtracted Paul’s roughly 8,800 young voters from his total, he’d have fallen behind Newt Gingrich there.

Some people have been analogizing the Ron Paul youth phenomenon of 2012 to the Obama surge of 2008, but it’s important to recognize that Obama drew 3-4 times as many young voters.

In New Hampshire, we show that youth voting and engagement are normally high, making young voters a potentially important part of that primary as well. In ’08, their preferred candidate (Barack Obama) lost, but youth turnout was very strong. It’s not clear whom they will support next Tuesday–or, indeed, whether New Hampshire will be interesting, since some polls are predicting a Romney blowout.

Even though I disparage prognostication, I tend to think that this year’s primary season is basically over, with the apparent “race” between Romney and his opponents now a bit of a ritual rather than a suspense-inducing choice. But the earlier stages of the Republican race were full of surprises, so who knows?

This op-ed of mine was published in the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette on Christmas Day (Dec. 25, 2011), but is not online.

America is watching the Iowa caucuses for clues about how the whole 2012 election will play out. Who will be the nominee? What themes and issues will predominate in the campaign? What new political and strategies will work this time around?

One of the most important questions is how youth will participate. By turning out, they can affect who wins and which issues are discussed, because they have distinctive values and concerns. Their participation also shapes the future of our democracy. A generation that votes and participates while its members are young will remain engaged for decades to come, whereas a generation that is alienated will take but slowly to politics.

In 2008, youth played an important role in the Iowa caucuses, more than tripling their turnout compared to 2004 and opting strongly for the eventual winner, Barack Obama. Four fifths of young Iowa caucus-goers participated on the Democratic side, but young Republican caucus-goers also helped to pick the state’s winner, choosing Governor Mike Huckabee by a substantial margin.

The Iowa caucuses set the tone for the whole season. Youth turnout was strong in the primaries and general election. Young people supported Obama to an unprecedented extent. Not only did they vote, but they set the record for campaign volunteering and were generally enthusiastic and engaged.

Certainly, 2012 could be different. Like older Americans, many young people are discouraged and angry. Recent focus groups conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found Iowa’s young people much less enthusiastic than they were in 2008.

Yet Iowa has a strong and durable tradition of youth participation. The state’s youth turnout rate in general elections always exceeds the national average and is sometimes near the top of the rankings. The same is true of community service and volunteering, in which young Iowans excel.

Although a discouraged national mood may push youth participation down, Iowa’s strong civic traditions should boost turnout if campaigns, politicians, and civic leaders work to engage young people in the election.

The research on youth voting offers some lessons.

• Reach out to young people personally: they respond much better to individualized encouragement and two-way conversations than to mass advertising and news events.
• Keep the message relatively moderate and bipartisan. Of the young Iowans who participated in the 2008 GOP caucus, more considered themselves “moderate” than “very conservative,” and that balance reflects national trends.
• Don’t forget the 17-year-olds, who have a right to participate in Iowa’s caucuses if they will turn 18 by November 2008.
• Finally, give young people serious responsibilities in the campaign—they will perform well and bring their peers with them.

Peter Levine directs CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.

We at CIRCLE provide detailed data on young voters, including demographic information and voting trends for all 50 states (accessible through the map on our homepage), in-depth research studies on young people and politics, and a recent overview report based on our own typology. Meanwhile, the Harvard Institute of Politics is contributing up-to-date national polls and focus groups in Iowa. Their latest poll (PDF) looks technically solid to me. It contains some interesting findings:

• Eleven percent of young people support the Tea Party; 21% support Occupy Wall Street. Assuming that those two groups are largely composed of different people, that means that up to 32% of young Americans support an extra-partisan political movement. In 2008, youth activism was strong, but the most unusual aspect was massive support for one official political campaign. I think if youth activism proves important in 2012, it will be about young people participating through a variety of channels, not just presidential campaigns. Lest we get carried away with the potential of the insurgent movements, just 2% of respondents say they have been part of an OWS demonstration and 6% say they are following the movement “closely.”
• One finding  seems to be attracting media attention today: only 30% of young people expect Obama to win, and 36% expect him to lose. I am not clear why this is interesting, unless confidence in his reelection is correlated with turnout. In 2008, most Obama supporters I knew did not believe he would win, but they worked and voted for him.
• Barack Obama beats the generic Republican candidate as well as all named GOP candidates, albeit with many undecided. (In fact, the undecideds almost tie the Obama supporters in the generic matchup.)
• Mitt Romney leads among young Republicans (at 23%). Ron Paul is next at 16%. The Ron Paul boomlet could matter to the nominating race. A recent Public Policy poll finds Paul actually leading among young Iowa Republicans. But that doesn’t mean that the typical young person supports Paul. Obama backers are far more numerous; they just don’t get to vote in the Republican primaries.
• Young people’s top issue priorities are all economic. That’s also true of older people, according to other surveys. Never in my decade of working on youth and politics have I seen a big gap between young and older people on issues. That means, by the way, that candidates don’t need separate messages or agendas to appeal to young people; they must simply include them in their outreach.