Young adults following race

WASHINGTON - Young adults are paying more attention to the 2004 presidential campaign than they did four years ago, according to an ongoing survey that monitors voter interest.

Polling done by the Vanishing Voter Project in the week before the March 2 Super Tuesday primaries found that nearly half of adults between 18 and 30 said they had read, seen or heard an election news story in the past day. In 2000, just over a third said the same.

Compared with 2000, young adults were also more likely to say they had talked about the campaign - by 39 percent to 29 percent - and were more likely to say they had been thinking about the campaign - by 43 percent to 26 percent four years ago.

"I think the war is the main driver," said Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "When you look at the history of young people's involvement, when there is a war, they tend to take more interest and get more involved."

Patterson, who runs the Vanishing Voter project, said young adults have been about evenly divided between the parties.

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