The Young: Turning Out

ISSUES'72

NIXON made two fantastic tactical blunders--he approved the 18-year-old vote and the new registration provisions," happily declared Fred Dutton, one of George McGovern's key strategists, last spring. Those moves, Dutton reasoned, would enable McGovern to pick up a net gain of some 13 million youthful voters over the Republicans and provide the margin of victory against Richard Nixon in November. Last week Dutton and the entire McGovern campaign received another rude jolt from the polls. George Gallup reported that those millions of young voters actually favor the re-election of President Nixon by an astounding margin of 61% to 36%.

As both parties accelerate their drive to capture a youth vote that seems to offer McGovern his best chance for an upset, officials in both campaigns doubt that Nixon has any such decisive advantage. Gallup concedes that his sample was small, including only 221 potential voters under the age of 30, and that on purely statistical grounds it could be as much as 8 points in error --which would still yield at least a 9-point Nixon edge. What the Gallup findings do indicate is that a segment of the population that once seemed trimly tailored to a McGovern candidacy is now torn between the two candidates and provides a lush field for cultivation and competition by the two camps.

A more valid indication of just where that fight now stands is provided by Gilbert Youth Research, a Manhattan-based firm that has been analyzing the attitudes of youth since 1945, and made its latest findings available to TIME. In personal interviews in August, the Gilbert organization found that the political views of 1,094 youths in the 18-through-25 age category show a much narrower gap between the candidates than does Gallup. Nevertheless, Nixon leads 51% to 44.5%. As expected, McGovern holds a large lead (59.9% to 43.3%) among college students, and Nixon's margin is almost precisely the same (51.1% to 35.4%) among youths not in school. The fact that of the 25 million potential new voters, about 18 million are not on a campus gives Nixon his overall lead. Yet the tenuousness of that advantage is illustrated by another Gilbert finding: an impressive 78.7% of college students are already registered to vote, compared with only 57.6% of out-of-school youths. Moreover, these nonstudents are far tougher to reach and enroll.

So far, the youth registrations have been heavily Democratic, according to Gilbert (56.4% to 17.1% Republican), but with a significant percentage (25.2%) of students listing themselves as independent. An intriguing Gilbert discovery is that only a fourth of the youth express "very high interest" in the election. Another 38.9% indicate they are "moderately" interested, while 36% have either a "soso" or "not very" level of interest.

The very ambiguity of the battle gives both sides new incentive to concentrate on youth. Those rosy Dutton predictions have been scaled down. Anne Wexler, a national McGovern voter-registration organizer, will be satisfied with a Democratic plurality of some 2,000,000 new voters among the young. To reach them, 60 full-time paid ($30 to $50 a week) student youth coordinators have been placed across the country, at least one in every state, working mainly with volunteers on 1,200 campuses. Relying largely on nonsalaried help, the McGovern people expect to spend only about $100,000 in this effort. Mobile registration units are being sent to such off-campus sites as discotheques, rock concerts and factories in pursuit of the nonacademic young. Such efforts have signed up nearly 100,000 youths in New York, for example, since Aug. 1.

Conceding nothing to McGovern, the well-heeled Nixon committee is pouring far more money, about $1,000,000, into its youth drive. It has 30 full-time workers in this effort at its Washington headquarters and 70 in the field. They have been quietly working all summer to reach working youths and have now turned to the campuses, attacking McGovern where he appears strongest. They recently signed up 25,000 campus volunteers for Nixon in just one week.

Both sides are using rock groups and show business personalities to attract youth and will be placing ads in campus newspapers. But both have decided that there is little advantage in trying to find issues in which young people may be especially interested. "It's a myth that there are adult issues and youth issues," claims a McGovern student coordinator in New York, David Oppenheimer. "The kids are thinking about the same sort of things as their parents." Or, as one G.O.P. worker in South Carolina put it, "There is not that much difference between the Pepsi and the beer generations."

Nevertheless, McGovern workers stress their candidate's longtime opposition to the war, particularly on campuses, and assail the high rate of unemployment under Nixon, assuming that the young are worried about present or future jobs. Nixon's leaders emphasize the decreasing number of draft calls, his intention to achieve an all-volunteer Army and some of his environmental programs. Despite his failure to end the Viet Nam War, he is being pitched as the "peace candidate," based on his Moscow and Peking travels.

Although antiwar protests have declined on campuses and U.S. involvement in ground combat has almost ceased in Viet Nam, the war remains the most volatile issue among college youth. A survey by the College Poll, conducted by New York's Greenwich Features, Inc., shows that this issue has grown surprisingly since last fall, when 44% of students predicted it would be the major 1972 campaign issue. Now 71% feel it is the top issue. During the same period, campus concern over the economy as the most worrisome problem has dropped from 36% to 14.5%. This recent study was done via personal interviews with scientifically selected subjects on more than 100 campuses.

While McGovern apparently retains a strong edge over Nixon on most college campuses, primarily because of his antiwar views, his luster has been considerably dimmed by his problems since getting the nomination. Gilbert Research finds that fully 25.1% of young people who had intended to register and vote Democratic are considering changing their minds solely because of McGovern's decision to drop Senator Tom Eagleton as the vice-presidential candidate. This feeling is even more evident off-campus than on it.

Interviewing young potential voters, TIME correspondents have confirmed a decline in enthusiasm for McGovern that could lead to serious problems in his getting the kind of door-to-door canvassing that he has expected from campus volunteers. Students express their disillusionment with McGovern in many, often emotional ways. "The way he picked the Vice President killed him in my eyes," complains Susan Currie, a junior at Massachusetts' Merrimack College. "He was like a little kid running around saying: 'Will you play with me?' " All the confusion since the convention has led Columbia Student Fred Schneider to wonder "if someone who acts irrationally and impulsively like McGovern isn't just another politician." At Princeton, notes TIME Campus Correspondent Landon Jones, "McGovern has become less the shining hope of March and more the lesser evil of September." The more radical students may be even more disenchanted. Many of his readers, says Fred Faust, 24, editor of an underground newspaper (The Outlaw) in St. Louis, "would rather light up a joint and forget it all."

Yet almost by default, McGovern retains strong campus support. "I favor McGovern only because I don't like Nixon," explains University of Pennsylvania's Ray Vurinovich in a common comment. "He has bombed Hanoi; he has mined Haiphong; all he has left is nuclear weapons," contends a Yale antiwar activist. "Frankly, it scares me." Adds Phil McCartney, 21, a junior college student in Florida's Dade County: "I don't expect much from McGovern; I think he is giving up his idealism--but he is the only choice."

There have always been, of course, students committed to either McGovern or Nixon who will cast their votes for more positive reasons. To Vicki Bartmess, 23, a recent college graduate in Inglewood, Calif., McGovern represents "humanity, integrity, ethics" and he offers her a "moral" option against what she considers Nixon's "military" choice. Nixon, on the other hand, is seen as "a very stable man, very cautious, with well thought-out ideas" by Jeannie Rice, 19, of Arizona State University. She, like an unpredictable number of young people, is registered as a Democrat but will vote for Nixon. The choice is simple for Jerry Colpits, 23, a lumber-company employee in Phoenix, who notes that "Nixon has the experience, McGovern hasn't."

Perhaps a bigger danger for McGovern as the competition for the youth vote continues is a declining interest in politics as an avenue of change among many young people, despite the reform movement he has led in the Democratic Party. This has been detected by TIME correspondents, who sense a growing mood of introspection and a feeling that so long as the vast majority of Americans seem likely to vote for the status quo the youthful fervor spent crusading in a cause seems pointless. Whether McGovern, ahead on campus and trailing among youth elsewhere, gets the boost he needs to compete with Nixon in November may well turn on just how many of his young supporters care enough to vote at all.

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