For McCain, Net deficit with young

Backers lament Obama's Web edge

Justin York is a 20-year-old college junior from suburban Orlando who has 848 friends on Facebook. In his free time, he can be found listening to his iPod, scaling an indoor rock-climbing wall, hiking with his girlfriend, or organizing for his favorite presidential candidate - John McCain.

"I can't imagine somebody more qualified," he said, or "more worthy of respect."

York, an active Republican since high school, last year helped start a student group for McCain at the University of Central Florida that typically attracts about 50 students to its meetings. Even in the middle of summer vacation, they are dedicated to the cause; the other night, they gathered to make signs for a "street rally" tomorrow.

But when York compares McCain's Internet presence to the ubiquitous Democrat Barack Obama's, he worries. "My concern is that if the Republican Party doesn't get creative, we will lose an entire generation of young people to the Democratic Party," he said.

McCain's campaign, lagging far behind Obama among young voters, is trying to catch up. It will soon roll out new MySpace-style social networking features on its website - which at the moment has special sections for women, veterans, and even lawyers, but not young people. It is also increasing its youth grass-roots organizing across the country and honing a new message aimed at young voters - "service to a cause greater than your own self-interest" - designed to dovetail with the 71-year-old's biography.

Still, McCain is late to the game.

Obama has built his website and his campaign's ground organization around young people. Crowds at Obama rallies are filled with bright-eyed supporters in their teens and 20s, drawn by the presumptive Democratic nominee's youthful vibe and message of generational change. A poll last month showed Obama leading McCain among young voters by at least 22 percentage points in the critical swing states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Ronald Reagan proved that a conservative with the right message and outreach strategy can win over the vast majority of younger voters - even if he is old enough to be their grandfather. Exit polls showed that voters 24 and under chose Reagan over his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale, by 20 percentage points in the 1984 landslide. Many in the vanguard of the Reagan Revolution went on to become the party's next generation of leaders - and some fill the ranks of McCain's campaign.

Political specialists say that McCain cannot afford to ignore the Millennial Generation, generally those born during the 1980s and 1990s and, depending on how they are defined, the largest ever born in America. They are increasingly politically active; in the 2004 presidential election, voters under 30 slightly outnumbered those over 65.

John Della Volpe, polling director for Harvard University's Institute of Politics, says that these voters cast off their political apathy in recent years for several reasons: the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war made politics seem more relevant; the rise of groups focused on improving young voter turnout, including Rock the Vote, made voting more accessible; and networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace made it easier and cheaper for campaigns to reach this highly mobile demographic.

McCain, known for his brash sense of humor and heroic life story, proved he could draw a young audience during the Republican primaries. He has been a frequent and popular guest on "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, appeared on "Saturday Night Live" (where he gamely joked about his age), and he was the only Republican to participate in an MTV/MySpace Presidential Dialogue on live television just before the New Hampshire primary. His twenty-something daughter, Meghan, writes a blog, McCainBloggette, about the lighter side of life on the campaign trail.

But in the general election, McCain is competing with a pop culture icon whose appeal to the young appears to be of a different magnitude. Obama, who turns 47 next month, is not only younger but seems to speak the language of young people.

"You ask him what's on his iPod, he can tell you," said Dan Shea, a political science professor and director of the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

McCain, on the other hand, has acknowledged that he does not even know how to get on the Internet - he said he is learning - and that he does not use e-mail, activities that now seem as natural as breathing to most young Americans.

"If it came out that the next president of the United States doesn't know how to drive a car . . . people would be like, 'That's weird, what's wrong with him?' " said Micah Sifry, editor of TechPresident.com, a blog about how the presidential campaigns are using technology.

Even worse, Sifry said, the social networking tools on McCain's campaign website are virtually useless compared with Obama's sophisticated online community, which connects users to other supporters and events in their hometowns. McCain's campaign put a "Pork Invaders" feature on its Facebook page, a spoof of the video game "Space Invaders," which made its debut in the late 1970s, when many of today's young voters were not yet born.

But McCain's campaign says that its core younger supporters are not necessarily the prototypical students who sit around in coffee shops networking on Facebook.

"Our younger voters don't look like the girls in 'Sex and the City,' " said Sarah Simmons, director of strategy for the McCain campaign. "A lot of young voters in our target states" such as Ohio, Iowa and Missouri "have young families, own homes, drive minivans, and have kids."

Those voters, she said, are concerned about basic economic issues such as gas prices, and McCain can make a compelling case that his policies would help them more. They are also less likely to be paying attention at this point in the summer, she added, giving McCain plenty of time to get his message out.

The campaign says it will drastically improve its website's social networking capacities well before college classes resume in the fall and the post-Labor Day sprint begins. The campaign now has youth chairs in 30 states, including all battleground states, and last week, it held a series of conference calls with young adult leaders across the country to begin organizing its volunteer groups. Many of those involved are already members of the College Republicans and other established groups, and many are already independently using social networking sites such as Facebook to communicate with each other and grow their ranks.

"It's an easy way to find people who want to become involved," said Pete Vitale, a 22-year-old college senior who chairs the McCain coalition for young voters in Michigan.

In New Hampshire, the campaign is building on the networks it started creating more than a year ago. Shaun Doherty, the state youth coalition chairman, said the campaign has organizations at 15 colleges and universities and the network is "growing even stronger now that it's the lead up to the general election."

Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.