He’s One of Us Now

Ah, the folly of youth. On Sept. 24, 2007, I pitched a story to my boss at NEWSWEEK about "Barack Obama and young voters—specifically, whether they can actually help him win the nomination or whether they'll just stay home, you know, watching MTV and eating Doritos as they have in the past." With Obama trailing Hillary Clinton by 10 points in Iowa, his campaign manager, David Plouffe, had just told reporters that youngsters were "Barack's core support—in effect, his hidden vote." I'm 25; my editor is 31. "I like this a lot," he replied. "Proceed, my friend."

A week later, after interviewing campaign staffers and independent observers, I sent him a profile of Obama's nimble Iowa youth program. Haunted by the specter of Howard Dean, whose hordes of orange-hatted out-of-state volunteers failed to fulfill the Vermonter's youthful potential in 2004, Team Obama had already hired four times as many staffers and invested five times as much money in the state, opening an unprecedented 31 offices and launching a novel "BarackStars" program to target the 40,000 untapped 17-year-olds set to turn 18 before Election Day. Rob Sand, a 25-year-old former Deaniac, admitted that he'd skipped the 2004 caucuses. But this time was different. "I'm more excited about Obama than I was about Dean," he said. "Dean was polarizing. Obama brings people together." Although counting on kids to carry the caucuses was "a tall order," I wrote, "the potential, at least, is there."

My boss liked the story—but his boss, a 43-year-old former Washington bureau chief, was skeptical. He'd heard the spiel before. Gene McCarthy. Gary Hart. Bill Bradley. Dean. "If young voters show up and Obama wins Iowa," he said, smiling as he slumped on an office sofa, "it's a big steak dinner for you guys. And I'm buying." My editor nixed "The Audacity of Youth" that night.

Exactly three months later, I arrived at the apartment of Paul Tewes, Obama's Iowa state director, as the icy streets of downtown Des Moines filled with young Obamaniacs hugging and cheering, "We did it!" Upstairs, scruffy postcollegiate staffers squeezed between couches and credenzas to celebrate the senator's surprise victory. Cans of Bud Light covered every surface. Youth turnout was up 135 percent from 2004, and the under-25 set alone gave Obama 17,000 votes, a 26-year-old speechwriter told me. Obama's margin of victory? Twenty thousand. "We did it" was right.

Rob Sand e-mailed the next morning. "This," he wrote, "is our next president."

Born in the 1980s, Sand and the supporters chugging Bud that night are what generational theorists call "millennials." (Full disclosure: I'm one, too. Further disclosure: I'm also a registered independent.) Now, a month after Iowa, my boss's boss is well aware that millions of my peers have fallen under the spell of the freshman senator from Illinois. At this point, the statistics seem almost stale: with youth turnout doubling, tripling and even quadrupling in the 30 contests to date, Obama won the 18-to-29 demographic by 4-1 in Iowa, 3-1 in New Hampshire, 3-1 in South Carolina and 2-1 in Nevada, and he trounced Clinton, often by as much as 50 percent among young voters, in 10 of the 13 Super Tuesday states with available data. (On Saturday, Obama swept the primaries and caucuses in Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana and the Virgin Islands.)