Poll Finds Pro-Kerry Vote Fever at Colleges

Drawn by the war in Iraq and an uncertain economy, college students are showing more interest in politics this year than they did in 2000, and they favor Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry over President Bush by 13 percentage points, according to a poll released Thursday by Harvard University.

Voter turnout among young people has fallen steadily since 18-year-olds were given the right to vote in 1972. But in the new poll, 84% of students said they would “definitely be voting” this year, compared with 50% who said so in the spring of 2000, when the Harvard Institute of Politics began surveying the population.

Although people often overstate their intention to vote, college students appear likely to cast their ballots in high numbers, the survey found.

“I think they are poised to make a definite impact on this election, especially in swing states,” said John Della Volpe, a pollster with Schneiders/Della Volpe/Schulman, which conducted the survey.

The survey’s findings dovetail with an unprecedented outreach to young voters this year by the candidates and by voter registration groups such as Rock the Vote, the New Voters Project and affiliates of MTV and World Wresting Entertainment, which have been wooing the 18- to 29-year-old bloc with concerts, conferences and even a video game.

The poll surveyed 1,202 college undergraduates from Oct. 7 to Oct. 13 on 210 campuses in 48 states. Students in the survey preferred Kerry over Bush, 52% to 39%, a margin driven partly by falling student support for the war in Iraq.

The Massachusetts senator led Bush by 17 percentage points in 14 battleground states, some of which have college populations significant enough to tilt the outcome in a close election, the poll found. Support for Kerry was also more pronounced among undergraduate women. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

A second poll released Thursday, surveying a broader group of young people aged 18 to 29, also showed a Kerry lead.

In that survey, released by ABC News, 57% favored Kerry and 38% chose Bush. That contrasted with the 2000 election, in which young voters mirrored the divide in the general population, with 48% for Democrat Al Gore and 46% for Bush.

In the Harvard survey, college students expressed significant engagement in the presidential election.

College students have been notoriously fickle about party identification, but the Harvard poll said that the renewed vigor had translated into increasing partisanship. Though party identification appears to gel around a general election, the number of students who called themselves independents or unidentified sank to 33% in the last six months -- an 8% drop from where it hovered for the last three years.

College students identified themselves as Democrats slightly more often than as Republicans -- 34% compared to 29%.

Although the poll found that more students planned to vote, Mark Hugo Lopez, research director at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland, said the real test of the increased enthusiasm would be whether the rise in college-age voters was limited to battleground states, where most of the get-out-the-vote effort had been centered.