Tag: Youth Voters

  AS you've probably heard, Denver has made the Final Four in the 2016 GOP convention playoffs, along with Dallas, Kansas City and, yes, Cleveland. I've...

A recent survey of Colorado voters shows likely Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney making slight gains in the state, mostly among unaffiliated voters, but still trailing Pres. Obama overall, and especially among young people, women and Latino voters.

BOULDER-- National leaders of the Obama reelection campaign recently told students gathered on the University of Colorado campus here that winning swing-state Colorado is among the highest priorities for the campaign and that youth voters are the linchpin in this year's victory strategy.

As prominent Tea Partiers desperately urge Republican lawmakers and Republican presidential primary voters to move further to the right, President Obama is racing ahead among independents. Public Policy Polling, delivering results today from its first national poll (pdf), reports that Obama leads GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney by a solid five points and that he leads Romney by a whopping 41-point spread among moderate voters.

DENVER-- As anticipated, President Obama this morning detailed his plan to use an executive order to ease the burden of student loan debt that presently presses down on tens of millions of Americans. Speaking in shirt sleeves and drawing on his own struggles with student debt as a young man, husband and father, Obama told the energized crowd in an event center hall on the downtown university Auraria Campus that he was determined for the foreseeable future to act wherever possible to relieve economic distress in the country without going through the gridlocked Congress.

Four out of five Coloradans under 30 support same-sex civil unions. In four years those young people will cast one of every three votes cast in Colorado. "When we vote, people listen," said one of the speakers from youth-voter group NewEra Colorado at a Wednesday rally at the University of Colorado Denver in support of the civil unions bill introduced in the state legislature by Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, last month. "We want equality and the time is now. We want the next generation to never even have to think about this. They'll just see that everyone is the same."

As you saw on the 2008 Youth Vote Map, Colorado is one of the states for which we have no exit poll data on young voters. Early in the evening on election night, CNN reported exit poll data showing Obama losing the Colorado youth vote 47 - 53 percent.

Our CIM colleague and youth vote expert Mike Connery offers a fascinating look at the youth vote at his blog Future Majority. The verdict from PEW, which is working off of the exit polling data:

Without a doubt, the overwhelming backing of younger voters was a critical factor in Obama's victory, according to an analysis of National Election Pool exit polls that were provided by National Public Radio. Obama drew two-thirds (66%) of the vote among those younger than age 30. This age group was Kerry's strongest four years ago, but he drew a much narrower 54% majority.