Romney Ryan Polling Well With Young People

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are making headway in wooing young voters to the GOP.  A Zogby Poll finds that Romney now has over 40 percent of the vote among voters under the age of 30:

For the first time since he began running for president, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40 percent of America's youth vote, a troubling sign for President Obama who built his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger, idealistic voters.

Pollster John Zogby of JZ Analytics told Secrets Tuesday that Romney received 41 percent in his weekend poll of 1,117 likely voters, for the first time crossing the 40 percent mark. What's more, he said that Romney is the only Republican of those who competed in the primaries to score so high among 18-29 year olds.

The Zogby poll is not an anomaly.  According to a poll by CIRCLE Romney was already doing much better than McCain among young voters even before the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket.

Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE -- a nonpartisan group that conducts research on young Americans’ political participation -- said that Romney clearly has improved over McCain’s standing with young voters but that the Arizona senator’s campaign set a low benchmark at a time when Republican youths were particularly unengaged.

“I don’t believe the fact that Ryan is relatively young himself has that much of an appeal,” Levine said. “There’s a tendency to think young people are just into superficiality, but I tend to find they vote based on their policy views.”

In a nationwide poll conducted online and released weeks before the addition of Ryan to the GOP ticket, CIRCLE found that Obama was leading Romney by a 55 percent to 42 percent margin among 18-to-29-year-old voters.