Power of Youth

Every political consultant and commentator in the country has been trying to figure out what’s going to make the difference in Tuesday’s presidential election. Rob Grabow doesn’t consider himself a political analyst. But he thinks he knows what demographic all the so-called experts should be focusing on.

Voters between the ages of 18 and 30.

As Grabow, just 27 himself, stresses in his book “Voting with Our Pants Down: “Why 44 Million Young Voters Have the Power to Begin the World Over Again,” “We ARE the future.”

And it looks, from Grabow’s point of view, the future that the majority of those young voters are expecting to face includes one with Barack Obama as president.

In fact, it was a question from his mother about Obama that helped Grabow find the focus for his self-published book.

“When I was starting to write,” he says, “I sat down with my mom and asked, ‘What is it you think people really want to know about young voters?’ And one of the questions that popped up was ‘Why does it seem like they’re supporting Barack Obama so much in this election?’ ”

Using that assumption as his guide, Grabow attempted to answer three questions: Who are young voters, what do they think, and why should we care?

But he had other goals as well. One, he says, “was mostly to help young people realize that there are 44 million of us and we have the power to determine not just this election but the elections of the future, regardless of political persuasion.”

The other, he says, was to correct what he says are “a lot of misperceptions about young people – that they’re apathetic, lazy, self-absorbed.”

“And so,” Grabow says, “I wanted to try to dispel what is a myth, at least to us. At the very best, it’s maybe a half-truth or even a quarter-truth.”

Truth was on Grabow’s mind long before he graduated from Gonzaga University in 2005. In 2004, he teamed up with classmate Dean Robbins to write the book “What We Think: Young Voters Speak Out,” a compilation of essays written by young voters in which 99 writers (out of 300 who submitted work) discussed such issues as public policy, social reflections and presidential politics.

A reviewer for Library Journal wrote that after reading “this wide selection of passionate outpourings, readers will be much less likely to think of the current crop of 18- to 34-year-old voters as apathetic. …”

After graduating, while working to found the Spokane-based sportswear company that he co-owns, Grabow found it hard to find the time to write a second book, one that Random House has expressed some interest in.

But then the idea for “Voting with Our Pants Down” came to him. And a combination of extensive research, polling and personal experiences led him on.

To young voters, Grabow says, there are four main issues: the economy, health care, the war in Iraq and education – with the economy rating far ahead of the others.

In terms of the presidential election, though, each particular issue, Grabow says, is less important than the overall message that each candidate emphasizes.

“As young people, I think we tend to identify with the overarching message than we do with the policy specifics,” Grabow says. “We understand the nuance of policy, but a lot of the time there’s a certain degree of cynicism whether a politician is going to follow through on what they say they’re going to do. And if that’s the case, then the larger message of their campaign … provides a way of interpreting the policy specifics.”

And the message that Obama has done better at emphasizing is one of “change and the hope for a brighter future.”

Obama, Grabow says, held to that mantra while Hillary Clinton stressed experience. And he held to it even as Republican candidate John McCain echoed Clinton, at first, then began talking about his own kind of change.

“But he came a little late.” Grabow says. “By that time we had already been identifying with Obama for a year and a half.”

Early on in his campaign, Grabow says, Obama toured college campuses. His campaign used social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to call for contributions of $5 to $15, attracting volunteers who sought out even more young supporters.

Obama’s biggest asset in the view of the overall young voter, Grabow says, is that he doesn’t even have to trumpet the call for change. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white American woman, all Obama has to do is appear in public.

“It almost becomes moot what changes he’s talking about from a policy perspective,” Grabow says. “He is change incarnate”

This particularly appeals to the 40 percent of young voters that, Grabow says, are members of minorities. But a whopping 94 percent of overall young voters, he adds, “have no problems with interracial marriage.”

“So we’re less inclined to be affected by his being half black and half white,” Grabow says. “In fact, I think it almost acts as a benefit to him because … through him we feel that we can transcend some of the perceived, and actual, injustices of the past, slavery and segregation.”

None of this, of course, ensures an Obama presidency. As Grabow points out, “A lot of young people obviously do support McCain. Say if even 30 percent of us support him, you’re talking about 15 million people.”

It is, though, an indicator of how young voters tend to look both at individual policies and the overall process: in a way that’s more pragmatic and personal than theoretical and ideological.

“You can talk about an issue like abortion or single-parenting,” Grabow says, “and those issues affect us more intimately than they do older demographics. On the other hand, you talk about Social Security, it’s so abstract and hypothetical for us that it tends not to catalyze us to the polls one way or the other. I think it’s a foregone conclusion that we think it won’t exist in its current form when we get to that age.”