In a campaign marked by countless awareness campaigns and registration drives, including P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" crusade, young voters responded in force Tuesday.
Nationwide youth turnout was at 47 percent Tuesday, according to yesterday's press release from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).
But an MTV/CIRCLE poll conducted in September found that 80 percent of young registered voters - Americans aged 18 to 29 years old - intended to vote on Nov. 2.
Nevertheless, "turnout increased greatly - it was four points higher than the previous peak youth turnout in 1992," said Hans Reimer, political director of Rock the Vote. "[This year's] numbers show that young voters turned out in force."
Rock the Vote, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, coordinated voter registration drives, voter education efforts and entertainment-related events across the country in an effort to get young people to vote in Tuesday's election.
"Youth turnout increased immensely so we are definitely satisfied; that was our objective," Reimer said.
CIRCLE's press release reports that 4.6 million more young voters showed up at polls on Tuesday than in the 2000 election, for a total of 20.9 million.
The proportion of young voters in the electorate remained the same as in 2000 at about 18 percent, since the overall number of voters increased as well.
In the 10 most hotly-contested states - Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - youth turnout was at 64 percent, up 13 points from 2000.
The youth's share of the electorate in these swing states was 19 percent - one point higher than in the entire nation.
Political Science Professor Jeffrey Berry said the mobilization of the youth vote on Tuesday was a success. "They're the hardest cohort to get out to vote so it was that much harder of a task," he said.
The Associated Press reports that 114.3 million Americans voted on Tuesday, with 99 percent of nationwide precincts reporting. The grand total of ballots cast will come to about 120 million when the nearly six million absentee ballots are counted.
Eleven percent of those who voted on Tuesday had never voted before.
This year's turnout - about 60 percent of the eligible American electorate - is the highest since 1968, when Richard Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey and 60.6 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.
Sophomore Dan Grant, a member of Tufts Votes and Tufts 1200, two on-campus groups who worked both to register students in Massachusetts and help out-of-state students get absentee ballots, said he was surprised the strong youth turnout did not translate into a victory for the Democrats.
"I deep down thought Kerry would win fairly easily what with all the young new voters," Grant said. "I underestimated the fact that Republicans have a big base they can mobilize too. Being in Boston you don't realize just how passionate the rest of the country is for the morality of Bush."
Indeed, according to Alejandro Arzu, a senior at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, "everyone on campus went out and voted - and they voted for Bush."
At Tufts, the political scene is quite different.
A campus poll conducted by the Daily in March showed that 67 percent of Tufts students planned to vote for Kerry. Another poll conducted by The Primary Source last month showed 86 percent of Tufts students planning to vote for Kerry.
Pollsters' assumptions that young voters would rally for the Democrats were not unfounded - CIRCLE reports that the 18- to 29-year-old demographic was the only age group to prefer the Democrats. Fifty-four percent of young voters chose the Kerry-Edwards ticket over 44 percent who picked the Bush-Cheney ticket.
But national exit polls show that Republicans were successful in mobilizing their supporters as well, diminishing the effects of the increased youth vote.
"There was a very large-scale effort to register conservative Christians who were inactive last time," Berry said. "[Bush adviser] Karl Rove made it public that that was their strategy."
Exit polls show that 70 percent of those who voted for Bush are Protestants that go to church on a weekly basis.
Eighty-one percent of Bush voters told exit pollsters that religious faith was the most important quality in a presidential candidate while 95 percent of Kerry voters said bringing change was most important.
Only five percent of Bush voters said change was the most important factor for them.
"This election was important to a lot of people," President of Tufts Republicans Nicholas Boyd said. "Americans see radical activists pushing things like gay marriage and getting rid of the partial-birth abortion ban; it strikes them as an abomination so they got out and voted for Bush."
Indeed, only six months after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments that would make marriage an exclusively heterosexual institution - all by double-digit margins.
In Mississippi, 86 percent of voters supported the measure.
Despite such ample evidence of the nation's partisan divide, Kerry told his supporters in his concession speech yesterday afternoon that the campaign's end brings a "desperate need for unity" in the country.
Junior Samir Aziz, who voted for Kerry via absentee ballot in his home state of Ohio, fears this might not be possible. "I think there will be lot of unrest in the country," he said.
Boyd seeks to assuage Kerry supporters. "Don't work yourself into fear over [this second] Bush presidency - the war on terror helps every American, including those at Tufts. [Bush will] prove he's a great commander-in-chief."
"But if he fails to convince liberals, he has a stronger GOP majority to fall back on," he said.
