TALKING POLITICS Is it too late for Kerry to take the youth vote? BY IAN DONNIS

The significance of the youth vote remains one of the great uncertainties concerning November’s president election. Although the major parties are energetically stalking youth votes — and there’s little doubt that young voters have the potential to tip the election (see "Will young voters deliver for Kerry?," News, May 21) — the level of actual participation remains a subject of debate.

Want a sense of the efforts by the two major parties? "This is our biggest-ever voter mobilization on college campuses and our largest grassroots training effort," Brian Richardson, a spokesman on youth issues for the Democratic National Committee, told Reuters. Not to be outdone, the College Republican National Committee told the wire service that its 60 field operatives in 40 states have recruited 140,000 supporters.

If the GOP has succeeded in putting John Kerry on the defensive, the Washington Post reported on Friday, September 10, "Young people have led the exodus from Kerry to Bush. Since August 1, Kerry’s support among voters ages 18 to 29 has dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent while Bush’s share of the young vote has increased to 46 percent — a 28-point turnaround in five weeks."

Not surprisingly, liberal advocacy groups are feverishly working to turn around what they describe as the sleeping giant of the 2004 election. The League of Independent Voters (www.indyvoter.org), for example, put out the call last week for "campus strategy sessions" to change the course of the election. "Our president is the great uniter — like a hurricane, he brings together people who wouldn’t normally speak to each other," Indyvoter said in a mass e-mail. "The next 53 days is your chance of a lifetime to make new friends, change the course of world history, and learn organizing skills that will help you in all areas of life. Don’t sleep!!! Historical circumstances like this don’t come along very often. So organize now before these weather conditions go away!!"

A few months ago, it seemed reasonable to think that young voters, who traditionally stay away from elections in droves, could help push Kerry into office. Now, though, if young people — who might have more on the line with a president who believes in a pre-emptive doctrine of war — are tilting Republican, it doesn’t seem auspicious for the Democratic candidate. The course of the election could still change, of course, and even some pollsters acknowledge that technological changes and the diminished willingness of people to answer polls raise questions about the accuracy of polls.

But if the findings in the Washington Post story prove to be prescient, the tactics of such groups as the League of Independent Voters, targeting focused voting in crucial swing states, will have come up wanting.