Word: iowa
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...Senator's daughter Maddie Esposito had seen the way her mother teared up whenever she heard Obama speak. And now it was happening again as mother and daughter sat side by side on the family-room sofa in a suburb of St. Louis, watching the results of the Iowa caucuses on TV. "You know you believe in him," Maddie admonished her damp-eyed mother. "It's time to step up." The next morning, Maddie, a college freshman home for the holidays, added a threat: "You have to do it, or I'm never talking to you again...
...that endorsement is the Democratic-nomination battle etched in miniature. Kids like Maddie Esposito are the muscle of Obama's army. His campaign has become the first in decades - maybe in history - to be carried so far on the backs of the young. His crushing margin of victory in Iowa came almost entirely from voters under 25 years old, and as the race moved to New Hampshire and Nevada, their votes helped him stay competitive. In South Carolina on Saturday, Jan. 26, Obama's better than 3-to-1 advantage among under-30 voters more than neutralized Clinton's narrower...
...Combining digital-age technology with old-fashioned shoe leather, the Illinois Senator first rallied Iowa students to cancel Clinton's cakewalk. While enthusiastic Democrats of all ages produced a 90% increase in turnout for the first caucuses, the number of young voters was up half again as much: 135%. The kids preferred Obama over the next-closest competitor by more than 4 to 1. The youngest slice - the under-25 set, typically among the most elusive voters in all of politics - gave Obama a net gain of some 17,000 votes. He won by just under...
...Obama's outreach to students didn't spring from some starry-eyed principle. It started as a specific element of his early strategy in Iowa. The first-in-the-nation caucuses allow 17-year-olds to vote if they are going to turn 18 before the general election, which means most high school seniors are eligible. To win those kids, Obama did something unusual in politics: he made them a genuine priority. After his rallies in towns across the state, he met backstage with student leaders from the area - a privilege most campaigns reserve for local VIPs and fund raisers...
...What began as a tactic to capture rural caucuses snowballed into a systematic strategy. Obama put his money where his mouth was, spending precious radio and television dollars on ads aimed specifically at Iowa students. A student-to-student phone bank dialed tens of thousands of dorm rooms and cell phones. By Election Day, "we had our entire field operation working to turn them out," says Riemer...