In the hours before his first presidential caucus, Zach Hernandez (24) sat at his office computer on Tuesday in St Paul, continually refreshing his profile on the Facebook networking site, watching the count of his fellow Obama supporters tick upward.“Zach Hernandez is excited for Minnesota to vote for Obama!” he declared on his personal page.The campaign of Barack Obama had been riding a surge of interest from young people, but whether that would translate into support at the polls was one of the great unknowns of Tuesday’s voting.Interviews across the country on Tuesday produced anecdotal evidence that some younger people did carry their enthusiasm into the polling place.At Spelman College, a historically black institution for women in Atlanta, where campaign signs for Hillary Clinton competed with photocopied Obama fliers, student after student said she would choose Obama in the voting. Others lobbied friends and parents with clips from boisterous Obama rallies. “It’s very much our campaign,” said Stephanie Baker, a 19-year old New York University student from Delaware. Since voting started in early January, Obama has become the Pied Piper of the Democratic race, walking off with a larger chunk of young voters than any other recent presidential candidate. By contrast, when Americans ages 17 to 29 were asked last June in a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll if they were enthusiastic about any of the candidates running for president, Obama and Clinton tied for first place: 18 per cent for him, 17 per cent for her. Some young Clinton supporters have recently chafed under what they said was becoming an annoying kind of group-think in Obama’s favour. As she trudged through the snow that blanketed the University of Denver campus, Krishma Parsad (27) said she was resisting Obama fever. Parsad, whose home is in California, recently cast an absentee vote for Clinton. Tori Spillane, an 18-year-old student at an all-girls Catholic high school in West St Paul, called Obama’s popularity with her peers “frustrating,” saying, “he just picks them up”. Elsewhere, many young people seemed immune to the charms of Obama or any other candidate. On a Manhattan subway car packed with people who turned out for a parade to honor the New York Giants, not a single member of the jersey-wearing crowd voiced an intention to vote. And at the computer bank of the DePaul University student center in Chicago, the nonvoters outnumbered the voters, for a variety of reasons, they said, including failure to register, lack of time and apathy.
