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Against the argument that McGovern could not possibly win in November, his men have insisted all along that besides an anti-Nixon restiveness in the land, the arithmetic of the new youth vote would be sufficient to carry him into the White House. Even before the convention, McGovern's strategists were planning a vast voter-registration drive aimed at signing up 18 million of the 25 million first-time voters.
Assuming McGovern's nomination, McGovern aides aimed to deploy an army of 100,000 young volunteers on July 20 to start registering. This effort, Dutton believes, "is the real sleeper" in the presidential politics of 1972. This is the first year, he notes, that a Supreme Court ruling is in effect allowing registration until within 30 days of Election Day; in past years it had to be done much earlier and it was difficult to generate political interest six months or more before an election. By Dutton's hopeful forecast, McGovern would get 13 million of the new youth votes, to 5,000,000 for Nixon. Considering the fact that Nixon won by only 500,000 votes in 1968, the McGovern planners thought they were going to the convention with a plausible argument.
Tidal Change. But there is a dispute as to whether the youth vote would be so overwhelmingly enthusiastic for McGovern—or nearly as large as McGovern hopes. Psephologist Richard Scammon believes that the young will follow their parents' example, although he concedes that there is a verifiable tendency for the young to be more liberal than their elders by about 5% to 10%.
The proportion of registered voters among college students is much greater than among noncollege young, but it is of course dangerous for politicians to assume that "the young vote" is a college vote. About 70% of the potential new voters are noncollege. Richard Nixon's campaign workers are already busy courting the working young. Besides, for all the volatile possibilities of the youth vote, the average age of American voters is still 45—including 50 million people over 50, a group that tends to turn out in far greater numbers than those under 25.
Those looking forward to a McGovern nomination also had to deal with a kind of repugnance factor in his case: even assuming that he got 13 million of the young, how many other voters —essentially workers and "ethnics" —would his policies on defense, welfare and redistribution of wealth scare off? So far, a TIME-Yankelovich survey indicates that many voters see McGovern as a mainstream candidate (see story, page 16). As the convention approached, some radicals were sneering at the idea of McGovern as a radical. Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, for example, examined McGovern's ideas and found him "a wild-eyed moderate" whose proposals were only mildly reformist and, in the case of welfare, not very different from Richard Nixon's. Yet the question remained as to how many voters, including more conservative Democrats, would in due course perceive McGovern as a dangerous candidate and, in apprehension, pull their levers for Nixon.