George,

Larry Sabato’s excellent analysis of the Democratic primaries and caucuses leaves out a very important factor that is present this year – a factor that has not been present for many decades. That factor is new voters, especially young people.

One of the major reasons that the turnout in Democratic primaries has been so high is that people who have never voted before finally have a reason to vote. Much of this is due to Barack Obama. High percentages of young people – those under 40 years old – are voting for Obama. The number of 18 to 29 year olds who have come out to vote in primaries and caucuses this year is up 60 percent over 2004.

The energy and enthusiasm that Barack Obama generates (especially in a new generation) will be translated into millions of new voters in the fall – enough perhaps to even tip some red states. These voters are not in Larry Sabato’s calculus because this “untapped” voter phenomenon has not appeared for many decades. (Howard Dean showed promise of tapping into such a phenomenon, but his campaign faltered.) And think of the large number of campaign workers that Barack Obama can bring forth to do the important work of phone-banking and getting out the vote in the fall.

Young, new voters are the life blood of political parties. Voters who identified with the Democratic party increased greatly in the 1930’s and 1940’s due largely to a disproportionate number of new voters coming into the electorate as Democrats because of FDR and the New Deal. As a result, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Fast forward to the twenty-first century where we now find an even divide between Democratic and Republican identifiers plus a large segment of Independents. The reasons for this shift in the distribution of identifiers would take too much time to explain here, but one of the factors is that new voters have seen no Democratic leaders in the past several decades who have inspired them. (Need I mention Mondale, Dukakis, the Gore of yore, Kerry, etc.?) Republican identification surged in the Reagan years.

If the Democratic party insiders (the superdelegates ) want a surge in new Democratic identifiers – a new generation of Democrats who will be Democrats the rest of their lives – they will back Barack Obama. If the superdelegates play short-sighted, self-interested politics as usual, they will have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is rejuvenate the Democratic party.

David RePass (Electronic mail, March 23, 2008)