Does Obama Have a "Hidden Vote"?

One of the things that we have noted during the last few months is that Barack Obama has a lot of support among younger Americans. If you go to My Space, Facebook, and You Tube, you will note that Obama has much more activity on those sites than any other candidate. Those are sites that younger people use and frequent.

This observation is borne out by news of a memo that Obama's staff is circulating about how Obama has a "hidden vote" which doesn't show up in the polls. The reason why it doesn't show up in the polls is that younger people don't use landlines for phone service, they increasingly use cell phones. The argument is that they are overlooked in polls because they aren't called by polling companies.

The problem, of course, as the author of the article linked to above points out, is that younger voters are notorious for not coming out to vote. If they voted at the same percentage as their parents, John Kerry would probably be president today and Bush would be down at his fake ranch having a ghost-writer writes his memoirs.

This would seem to be especially true with regards to Iowa, which is a caucus state, as is Nevada. Participating in a caucus means going out on a winter evening in January and hanging around while the caucus takes place. It calls for both organization to get your voters to the polls and for commitment from those voters. If younger voters don't show up to vote, which is a relatively quick process, is it realistic to expect them to show up for a caucus?

We hope that Obama's campaign is correct because younger voters are increasingly turned off by the Republican Party. An energized population of young voters could guarantee a Democratic victory in 2008. Whether it will happen, though, is a big unknown.