Politics

Miscellaneous Obama Blogging

January 5, 2008 / 2:01 PM EST / Political Animal

MISCELLANEOUS OBAMA BLOGGING....This is more a conversation starter than anything else, but I thought there were two especially interesting aspects of Barack Obama's victory in Iowa on Thursday. Here they are:

Obama won (or tied) among all income groups and among union households. This is really pretty startling considering Hillary Clinton's supposed strength among blue collar voters (not to mention all those union endorsements she snagged) and John Edwards' fiery working class populism. Ron Brownstein's famous column last year dubbing Clinton the "beer track" candidate and Obama the "wine track" candidate got a lot of attention, but in Iowa, at least, that wasn't true. Turns out that beer-chugging union members like Obama pretty well after all.
The turnout of young voters for Obama has already gotten a lot of attention, and deservedly so. After the 2006 election I wrote a post that was dismissive of the supposed uptick in youth voting, but a couple of critical emails prompted me to revisit the subject and I ended up changing my mind. It really did seem like there was a significant increase in youth participation, and it was all good news for Democrats.
But beyond the steady shift of youth voting between the parties, the magnitude of the youth vote for Obama within a Democratic caucus was genuinely stunning. Among teens and twenty-somethings he beat Hillary 57% to 11%. Holy cow! And among 30-44 year-olds his spread was only barely less impressive.
What accounts for this? Attitudes toward the Iraq war aren't substantially different among age groups, so I don't think that's it. And policy-wise, as everyone has noted time and time again, there's not really that much daylight between Clinton and Obama. Is it merely the fact that Obama is a young man himself? That seems too simplistic. Or is it the fact that young people, more than the rest of us, are tired and cynical about politics and really do buy into Obama's claim that he's a post-partisan candidate who can end all the nastiness and empty Beltway wrangling?

I'm not sure myself, but it seemed like a good weekend conversation starter. What is it that accounts for Obama's strength among both blue-collar workers and young people? And can he keep it up in New Hampshire and beyond?

UPDATE: After I changed my mind about the youth vote, I ended up writing an op-ed on the subject for the Omaha World-Herald. I don't actually know if it ever got printed, and in any case they don't put their op-eds online. But I've stuck it below the jump if you're curious to see what I had to say. It was written last summer.