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In what is becoming a fine tradition around these parts, here's more information courtesy of the Harvard IOP survey showing that McCain has a snowball's chance in hell of capturing the youth vote this year.

As you can see, Obama has a pretty much insurmountable 21 point lead among 18 - 24 year olds, and even Clinton has a healthy 7 point lead.

Digging into the cross tabs a bit more, we can see just where Obama's striking lead comes from. In match-ups vs. Sen. McCain, Obama outperforms Clinton among self-identified Democrats and Arican Americans, and seriously eats into Sen. McCain's youth base - young white voters. He also, amazingly, pulls young Republican voters away from McCain.

Notice also that a Clinton candidacy further opens the door for Demcoratic losses to third party candidate Ralph Nader. That's a little scary - particularly if you were around and voted in 2000.

One more significant finding in the IOP data is that Sen. Obama is currently polling 3x better among college students at this time in the campaign than Sen. Kerry was against President Bush at this time in 2004.

In March 2004, Sen. Kerry was leading 48 to 38% among college students. That margin basically held. On election day Kerry won all youth 54 - 45%. Obama currently leads McCain 54 - 28%. I would like to see that margin repeated this November.

Two new polls of young voters came out this week. A few days ago MTV and CBS News released a poll on young voters (18 - 29), and earlier today the Harvard Institute of Politics released their spring survey of over 2,000 college and non-college 18 - 24 year olds.

There are a ton of data in each poll, and rather than post one mammoth (and probably unreadable) blog post on each of them, I'm going to spend the next two or three days picking out the interesting bits of information in smaller, bite-sized posts.

Right now I just want to start with the comparative topline data from the Harvard IOP Poll. It seems that by every indicator, young people - college and non-college - are more engaged in the political process than at this time last year or in 2004. This is not unexpected, but definitely worth mentioning. From the survey:

• 76 percent of 18 - 24 year olds say they are registered to vote an increase of 7 points since November (the last time the IOP conducted a survey).
• 60 percent of college students have seen voter registration materials around their school, an increase of 15 points since November.
• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of eligible young voters (72% of college students and 61% of those not in college) indicate that they will participate in the general election. This is an increase of three percentage points (3%) since the November 2007 survey.
• Young Americans who consider themselves to be politically engaged or active increased 5 percentage points, from 35 percent to 40 percent.
• Compared to this point in the calendar during the 2004 campaign cycle, which saw a 31 percent increase in youth participation compared to 2000, the percentage of college students who say that they are definitely voting has increased 10 percentage points (62% to 72%).
• The percentage of college students who are following the campaign closely increased 11 points, from 62 to 73 percent.

I'll have more shortly as I work my way through the survey.