20 year-old Meredith Johe is majoring in finance major at Wake Forest University. She is the Secretary for College Republicans and plans to vote for Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election.  She says a common topic among her friends is the economy.

“I just want to be able to go out there and get a job and at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year, they did this whole presentation about how more people are living in their parent’s basement and it was at that moment that I woke up and realized that it is scary that the amount of students who are unable to find jobs is exponentially increasing and I don’t want that to be me,” says Johe.

Many Democratic students also agree that the economy is a big concern this year. 20 year-old Logan Healy-Tuke is co-president of the Wake Forest College Democrats. He will cast his first presidential ballot in support of President Barack Obama. He says social issues are what’s driving many of his friends to the polls.

“I think over the past few years we have seen the importance of gay rights. I think it is disturbing that friends that I have who are gay are not able to be treated equally and I think that shines with the rest of my generation as well. I think our generation is more socially liberal,” says Healy-Tuke.

Katy Harriger, a professor and chair of the Politics and International Affairs Department at Wake Forest University, says the youth vote will be as important this year as it was in 2008. 

“Young people support the Democratic party almost two to one over the Republican party. If you have that type of advantage within a particular age cohort, mobilizing that cohort is important,” says Harriger.

Harriger says research on mobilizing young voters shows college students are more likely to vote than non-college students. That’s because students are exposed to a variety of political messages and activities in class and on campus.

She says both parties are stepping up their efforts with young voters through social media, and more traditional methods like door to door campaigning and telephone calls.

“It looks like the Democratic Party is doing more outreach work than the Republican party, but the Republican party is doing more than it did in 2008, because it recognizes it has a big disadvantage in that age cohort. Whether it is effective or not remains to be seen,” says Harriger.

In September, Harriger and took several of her students went to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. She was invited to participate in a forum with activists and other political scientists called “Conversation with the next generation”.

Even though the voting age was lowered to 18 more than 40 years ago, Harriger says researchers are still trying to figure out the best way to connect with young voters. 

“I thought they overemphasized the Tweeting. There is a live audience of college mostly college students they were encouraging them to sit there and Tweet and they would report what people are tweeting, which included often questions, but they never responded to them,” says Harriger.

Harriger added, “I think they thought these are you college students and they like to tweet but they didn’t think about the opportunity of a live audience for the real interaction that could of happened and the students that I talked to afterwards were disappointed with the same thing, so I think both parties are still trying to figure out how do we have the conversation with the next generation and how do we take them seriously.”

Harriger says research show that young voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are turned off by extreme partisanship. Healy-Tuke says the key to engaging more young voters like him is improving communication during the off-election cycles.    

“How cool would it be if Republicans and Democrats, the parties would team together and say we are going to 60 college campuses together and propose ideas or some type of  problem and pick students both politically active and not help figure them out.  That’s a great way for engagement and that’s what politics should be about,” says Healy-Tuke.