Wooing the Youth Vote

A substantial share of McGovern's hopes for wresting the White House away from Nixon resides in the youth vote. Perhaps as many as 18 million of the 18-to 24-year-old potential new voters could conceivably be registered and eligible to cast their ballots on Nov. 7, and the McGovern game plan foresees as many as 13 million going Democratic. The Republicans have other ideas. While McGovern's much-heralded army of 100,000 young volunteers prepares to start its massive registration drive in mid-August, a quiet Republican task force of 125,000 youngsters is already hard at work in 35 states and will move into the 15 others by Aug. 1. The current focus of the G.O.P. Youth Division, in operation since early January, is to register working youths who are not in college, a group slightly more than two-thirds as large as the collegians, most of whom the Republicans concede to McGovern for now.

"We're working the neighborhoods," says Tennessee Senator William Brock, 41, co-chairman of the Youth Division Congressional Advisory Council. "No direct mail or anything like that. We're going to win with registration. The heavier the registration and the heavier the vote, the better."

There are 75 full-time workers supervising the nationwide Nixon youth effort. Though Brock and other campaign officials have refused to admit just how much is being spent on the grassroots registration drive, they concede that it is "far and away" better-financed than any other segment of the overall Nixon campaign. Nixon is following the effort closely and, in a recent conference with Clark MacGregor, chairman of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, sought reassurance that the figure of 125,000 field workers was not inflated. Indeed not, said MacGregor, adding that he expected a minimum of 1,000,000 young volunteers to be working for the President by Election Day.

Window Dressing. The Youth Division canvassers have been concentrating on homes in towns and cities across the country, where 90% of the young potential voters live with either their parents or their own families. Computers have helped spot low-cost housing areas where young married couples live, and in some states driver's-license records have been culled for young people, who are later contacted by volunteers.

The campus vote has not, however, been written off by the Republicans. Despite the negative receptions accorded Nixon people earlier in the campaign, volunteers will move onto campuses when colleges reopen in the fall. Community and vocational colleges, where Nixon support has been consistently good, will get special attention from Youth Division registration teams --possibly with the hope of taking up some of the slack created by the heavy going on larger liberal arts campuses.

In a further effort to woo the youth vote and to counter the Democrats' party reform that allowed a record number of young people to become delegates to their convention, the Republicans have reserved 3,000 gallery seats at their Aug. 21-23 convention in Miami Beach for young G.O.P. volunteers. Their presence is intended to offset the fact that only 10.7% of the Republican delegates will be under 30 years old v. the 23% that the Democrats displayed.

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