CNN:
Iowa students could sway caucuses, if they show up
For college students, winter break is a time for vegging out and relying on mom and dad to do the laundry.
But in Iowa, Democratic presidential campaigns are crossing their fingers that this bloc of voters can snap out of vacation lethargy and drag themselves to the caucuses on January 3.
Iowa election laws allow out-of-state students attending college there to vote, and 17-year-olds can vote in the caucuses as long as they are 18 years old by election day.
This means that any given non-Iowan going to school in Iowa could caucus in Iowa then caucus/vote in their home state when it’s their turn. The concept of one person having two votes in a quasi-Federal election doesn’t grab me.
In the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucuses, only 17 percent of all caucus-goers were between the ages of 17 and 29, and the majority of that age group was made up of people over the age of 22.
If one compares those figures to the fact that more than 65 percent of caucus-goers that year were over 45 years old, it’s easy to understand why courting the traditional Iowa caucus attendee can prove more successful than relying on college-age voters.
Perhaps Iowa is different, because theirs are the last big-time caucus left, but take it from someone who has participated in a caucus before (and helping to give Pat Buchanan an upset victory in Missouri’s 1996 Republican Caucuses), if politics are old people’s games, then cauci are even more so. In that particular hall where the caucus was held, I was a few weeks shy of 19 years old, but the only person in the room under 40.
