Republicans are courting young voters with cheerful appearances on MTV, and Democratic presidential contender John Kerry is visiting colleges with a campaign dubbed "Change Starts with U".
Non-partisan groups such as "Rock the Vote" and the "Hip-Hop Summit Action Network" aim to register millions of new young voters by November, as do anti-Bush groups like "PunkVoter", while universities are rife with activists hoping to sway the election with massive youth participation.
Unfortunately, experts say it probably won't matter.
Youth voter participation has plummeted since 1972, the first year the voting age dropped to 18 in the United States and half of 18-to 25-year-olds cast ballots. That figure has slipped to a third and shows little sign of picking up.
"In everything else we're such smart asses," said Maya Enista, 20, a "Rock the Vote" organiser and student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "But here we are letting other people make decisions for us."
Low youth turnout is a fact of life, experts said.
Not until they get jobs, have families and buy homes do people vote in significant numbers, said Eric Plutzer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University.
Youth turnout this year in the Iowa caucuses quadrupled in comparison to 2000, giving experts and researchers a jolt of excitement, but that trend failed to grow, said William Galston, director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement in College Park, Maryland, home of the University of Maryland.
"Through the remainder of primaries, there was no clear upward trend, which frankly we found quite surprising," he said. "Anecdotally there are signs all over the place of increased interest on the part of young people in political developments this year."
While researchers don't know exactly what caused the Iowa blip, they say it was probably the personal campaigning that works well with young voters, the crowded Democratic contest and unprecedented use of the Internet, particularly by the Howard Dean campaign. "That degree of intensity can't possibly be replicated across all 50 states in the general election," said Plutzer.
At the other end of the spectrum are older voters, whose high turnout and organised political clout helps put such issues as prescription drug benefits and Social Security high on candidates' agendas, experts say. Statistics show that in about 20 years, one third of US voters will be over 65.
This young generation may be particularly hard to lure to the polls, Galston said. They are voting at far lower rates than their parents and grandparents did when young, he said.
"We're not just talking about a life-cycle effect. We also seem to be talking about generational differences," he said. Galston says youths are growing up in a media-saturated culture that makes them not merely savvy but cynical. "They do not tend to believe or take at face value what they see on television," he said. As politics grows less personal and more a media phenomena, he said, young people see the media, especially television, as means of manipulation.
Such apathy is particularly hard to fathom for foreigners, said Marius Calin, 25, a Romanian-born college architecture who waited to see Kerry speak recently in New York. "It's really sad," he said. "They don't understand how much difference their vote makes."
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