Youth Vote

In some political circles, it has passed for a maxim that the new 18-year-old vote will make little difference. Last year, for example. Political Analysts Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon wrote in The Real Majority that the young, if they bother to vote at all, will probably vote along the same lines as their parents.

Now Frederick G. Dutton, who served as political aide both to John and Robert Kennedy, has proposed a different theory. In Changing Sources of Power--American Politics in the 1970s (McGraw-Hill), Dutton foresees the millions of new young voters bringing about large changes in American politics. In 1972, 25 million young people will become eligible to vote in national elections for the first time. "Voter turnout," writes Dutton, "increases with education, affluence, political awareness and social influence, and those attributes are all demonstrably higher in the coming generation than in any other new voting group in history."

The new voters, he says, are more socially than economically concerned, weary of their elders' preoccupation with the Communist menace and heavily politicized by the civil rights struggles of the '60s and by the Viet Nam War. The result, according to Dutton, will be an infusion into the political process comparable to that of the Western settlers in the age of Jackson or of urban workingmen under the New Deal.

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