G.O.P. Reach to Youth

At Republican National Committee headquarters, the drive to re-elect Richard Nixon has yet to shift into high gear. In the offices of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the official campaign headquarters, some of the desks are still empty, awaiting the arrival of a staff--including Attorney General John Mitchell, who is expected to take up his old post as campaign manager. But one part of the Nixon drive has been operating at full tilt for weeks: the G.O.P. Youth Division is wasting no time going after the 25 million young men and women eligible to vote for the first time this fall. The early activity is spurred by the sound premise that the youth vote could be the key to a second term in office for President Nixon.

The Youth Division is headquartered in posh offices one block from the White House. There a staff of twelve professional political workers--all pointedly under 30--directs the most sophisticated youth campaign of any candidate. Its goal: to organize young volunteers across the country for doorbell ringing, voter registration and grass-roots organizing. With registration among the young currently running 2 to 1 Democratic, the G.O.P. hopes that its youthful volunteers can persuade enough of their contemporaries to vote Republican to offset the Democrats' nominal advantage.

To identify potential volunteers--and voters--the Youth Division relies on computerized analyses of young voters. The result is a carefully laid out plan that, unlike the strategies of most of the Democratic candidates, does not rely primarily on college students. (Only one-fifth of the voters between 18 and 25 attend college.) While the G.O.P. has mapped speaking tours for Cabinet members and White House officials at key campuses across the country, the emphasis will be on non-college youth. Traditionally less politicized and vocal than their collegiate counterparts, they have been somewhat overlooked by candidates in the past.

Like their parents, noncollege youth are primarily interested in the less glamorous economic and domestic issues: mortgage interest rates, unemployment, taxes for schools, government services. To reach them, the G.O.P. will send battalions of organizers into areas where new housing construction--and young families--is concentrated. G.O.P. statisticians have discovered that in California, for example, 2.4 million of the 2.5 million new voters live in ten of the state's 58 counties. G.O.P. bigwigs will visit vocational schools as well as universities.

Not Agnew. The scheme is the brainchild of one of the Republicans' most successful votegetters among the young, Tennessee Senator William Brock. In his 1970 race against Albert Gore, Brock carried the youth vote by a 2-to-l margin, despite Gore's dovish stance on the Viet Nam War. Brock won on 15 college campuses, losing just one and tying Gore in another. He is co-chairman of the Congressional Advisory Council for the Youth Division, and his former campaign manager, Kenneth Rietz, 30, is director of the Youth Division. With Brock on the advisory committee are ten Republican Congressmen primarily in their 30s and 40s, among them former Pro Quarterback Jack Kemp. A celebrity committee, including My Three Sons Star Stanley Livingston and Miami Dolphin Linebacker Nick Buoniconti, has been set up to provide the glitter for rallies and letterheads.

The real work is done by Rietz and his paid staff of twelve. Although no figures are available on the cost of the youth campaign, Rietz admits that his budget is generous and his latitude wide: "This is no back-of-the-bus thing." At this stage of the campaign, he and his people are concentrating on registration. An elaborate record-keeping system involving triplicate forms and follow-up letters and phone calls has been set up for each potential supporter contacted by volunteers. The staff is studiedly silent about Spiro Agnew, brushing aside questions about the Vice President with a curt statement: "The important thing is to re-elect the President." That Agnew's attacks on students will be a liability in campaigning among the young was underscored at a meeting of youthful Nixon supporters in Pennsylvania last week. When asked which Administration officials would be welcome campaigners, one youth replied: "Don't send Agnew."

Even the carefully honed Youth Division cannot overcome all of the antipathies young people feel about Nixon--his somewhat gray and cold image, the drawback of some key figures in his Administration, for example. Rietz and his young colleagues do not expect to elect the President on the basis of the youth vote, but they hope to prevent that vote from defeating him. Says one: "Let's face it--Nixon isn't going to carry the college vote. But the margin by which he loses it is important, and we're cutting that down."

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