Young Americans still key to Obama's campaign as candidates prepare for second presidential debate

According to all the polls, President Obama is still number one with young voters. In fact, the Mitt Romney camp has all but given up hope of ever winning over the young to their cause.

Rich Beeson, the Romney campaign's political director, has said: "We're not going to win them, but we're going to eat into the margins. And those are the margins where they need to run up the score."

A good turnout of young voters is a big advantage to Obama, and his campaign workers will be out in force today through Friday encouraging the 30,000 students at Iowa State University to vote Obama at early voting stations that opened for business today across campus.

The power of first-time voters was key to Obama's election in 2008. The Obama campaign enthused youth to vote in numbers not seen before. He will be hoping to capture that same level of enthusiasm this November, but received wisdom is that the youth are not as yet as engaged with this election as they were four years ago.

Obama has visited many a campus already in the last few weeks, whereas Romney has almost ignored them. Everything in this election is based on percentages, and Romney is not going to waste time on a group that won't offer him a substantial percentage return at the ballot box. It seems that students of all classes fall into Romney's now infamous 47 percent.

Tuesday will see Obama and Romney going head-to-head again for the second presidential debate. Romney came out on top in the last debate, and Obama is hard at work today preparing for what he hopes will be a much better showing this time around.

Some of the policies that Romney and right-wing GOP members see as winners for them when it comes to the “moral majority” are the very ones that students and other youth groups get turned on by. Obama's attitudes to gay rights, student loans and Medicare, for instance, go down well with many young voters.

The young are particularly useful when it comes to the power of social networking. Back in 2008, the young were the prime users of social networking sites like Twitter. Now such sites are used by many, many more older groups, but the young are better at using their thumbs to get the message out about their fave politicians and in an election year that's overwhelmingly Obama.

The young are, of course, our future leaders, in fact our future everything. It perhaps says much about the Romney campaign and Romney himself that they feel the young are not really worth worrying about. They may regret this position down the line.

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