In a few months, it seems as if the unsurprising will be confirmed: Mitt Romney will become the nominee for the Republican Party for the 2012 race for the White House. While Rick Santorum has seemed to provide a brief scare for the Romney campaign, the 2012 race’s brief history has shown that such will be short-lived, and Romney will continue to prevail. As nominee, Romney will have to continue to attract the GOP youth he has been able to attract thus far or else face failure.
With a recent online, unscientific A-Blast poll, of 125 voters, 62 percent reported that they would vote for Obama in the upcoming presidential race. With such numbers, it seems as if Mitt Romney will face a run for his money in November. However, a recent Gallup poll (far more scientific in execution) has indicated that President Obama will instead be breaking a sweat, with projections of 50 percent of voters casting their ballots for nominee Romney and 46 percent for Obama.
This is good news for Mitt Romney who has been treated as the underdog in the hypothetical race against Obama. As I wrote in the Jan. 18 issue of The A-Blast, Ron Paul is the unmistakable candidate of the GOP youth.
However, results from Super Tuesday show that Mitt Romney received 189,000 votes from GOP youth, versus that of 181,000 for Ron Paul. This suggests that Romney should be taken more seriously than the media has in the past.
Of course, as Village Voice reporter Victoria Bekiempis reminds readers, such numbers pale in comparison to the 900,000 votes then-Sen. Obama received during the same period in time in 2008, but not so when compared to the 164,000 votes Sen. John McCain received in 2008 from the GOP youth.
This is an important note to make, for in such (still) early stages of the presidential race, a 25,000 vote increase for the considered front-running candidate for the GOP marks an increasing youth interest in the Republican platform.
When considering the manner in which Romney has marketed himself to prospective voters in recent months, such is not surprising. For many youth who, as freshmen in college, saw hope in Sen. Obama’s message of economic hope and redemption but have not yet seen such hope realized, Mitt Romney is an appealing alternative.
Toting his background in “corporate America,” in every one of the GOP’s 20 plus debates in the past year, Romney has tried to enamor a portion of the GOP electorate that seemed alienated from his appeal to moneyed, upper class voters.
These numbers show that it has worked.
The real test for Romney, however, will come as Obama increases his campaigning in the months to come. Once Obama begins to campaign (seriously) in universities across the country as he did four years ago, Romney will be able to gauge the interest of disgruntled American youth, and decide upon the effort he should exert in convincing such youth that his platform will better serve their interests than that of Obama.
