Paul Ryan's uncertain impact on the youth vote

This article originally appeared on RealClearPolitics.

Paul Ryan is 42 years old, looks a decade younger, and exudes a youthful energy that a graying President Obama may not be able to match deep into the fourth year of his presidency.

But does any of that really matter to younger voters?

According to a poll conducted by John Zogby over the weekend, the addition of Ryan to the Republican presidential ticket may indeed have boosted the Romney campaign's appeal to the demographic that helped propel Obama to the Oval Office in 2008.

Romney trailed Obama, 49 percent to 41 percent, in the poll of likely voters ages 18 to 29 -- a significant narrowing of the gap from four years ago, when Obama dominated the youth vote over John McCain by 66 percent to 32 percent.

Ryan is the first member of a presidential ticket who was born in the 1970s, and young conservatives appear to be particularly enthused about him.

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"He's closer in age to me than he is to Vice President Biden, and someone who's young and energetic has an appeal to young people just because of what he represents," said Alex Schriver, chairman of the College Republican National Committee. "A lot of Congressman Ryan's actions and proposals have been talking about the next generation. You'll see him consistently say, 'My plan is, in part, making sure that we can make promises to young people that we can keep.' "

Romney's oft-repeated account of "going steady" with his "sweetheart" Ann and his frequent use of the word "why" to begin declarative statements are among his many tics that hark back to a distant era. Ryan's lexicon and demeanor, on the other hand, exude a youthfulness with which the post-baby boom generations can identify more readily.

Ryan, after all, was born three years after the late Kurt Cobain, an iconic figure of Generation X.

But for the time being, there is scant polling data on the effect of Ryan's selection on younger voters, and experts on youth voting patterns warn that superficial impressions of a candidate often fade quickly.

A candidate's age, in and of itself, has not been shown as a reliable indicator of how younger voters cast their ballots in past elections.

Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE -- a nonpartisan group that conducts research on young Americans' political participation -- said that Romney clearly has improved over McCain's standing with young voters but that the Arizona senator's campaign set a low benchmark at a time when Republican youths were particularly unengaged.

"I don't believe the fact that Ryan is relatively young himself has that much of an appeal," Levine said. "There's a tendency to think young people are just into superficiality, but I tend to find they vote based on their policy views."

In a nationwide poll conducted online and released weeks before the addition of Ryan to the GOP ticket, CIRCLE found that Obama was leading Romney by a 55 percent to 42 percent margin among 18-to-29-year-old voters.

Unsurprisingly, economic concerns were at the top of those voters' priorities, as a plurality of 33 percent named "jobs and the economy" as the most important issue for politicians to address.

The fiscal issues with which Ryan's political career is most closely associated, on the other hand, registered relatively low in the poll.

The federal budget deficit was named as the top concern by just 10.5 percent of young respondents in the CIRCLE poll, while Social Security and retirement clocked in at only 2.9 percent.

Republican strategist Kristen Soltis, communications adviser for Crossroads Generation -- a pro-Romney super PAC that targets young voters -- agreed that Ryan's relative youth, "while certainly not a downside," was overrated as a selling point to the youth demographic.

Solis said that if Romney and Ryan want to expand their appeal to younger voters, they should not "take the bait" on making the election a referendum on entitlement reform.

"There are some obvious ways that [Ryan's] message of 'Hey, we need to fix this program so that it can be there for you,' that that could be really appealing," she said. "But with unemployment so high with young people, with so many of them having to move in with mom and dad to make ends meet -- so many of them having student loan debt -- the personal economic stuff is going to be even more influential in how young people vote."

Democrats seem to be under no illusions about the extent to which the enthusiasm advantage Obama enjoyed four years ago among younger voters has closed. The president's allies purport not to be any more concerned about that trend than they are about signs of declining ardor among other elements of his 2008 base.

Democrats know full well that the record crowd sizes and at times ear-splitting level of adulation that once greeted Obama on college campuses may never return. In light of that, they intend to make Ryan's budget plan a political liability among young voters in the same manner they have tried with the electorate at large.

Democratic strategist Maria Cardona acknowledges that the Ryan pick "will excite the conservative youth vote because he's young and -- in their minds -- hipper than Romney, which he is," but she sees an overarching factor. And that is "where he stands on the issues. Paul Ryan is very conservative. He's a darling of the Tea Party."