Forget about the youth vote...

Barack Obama starts campaign emails with 'hey', fuels his teenage audiences with pizza and likes to listen to Beyonce in his spare time.

Clearly he knows the way to a student's heart. But will this pursuit of youth votes help Obama in the long run?

Real Clear Politics thinks not. In the following post, they suggest that courting this demographic is not actually as useful as many Democrats think:

But, as Nagourney notes, the youth vote is largely an illusion. The larger point is that he or she who tries to capture the "youth vote" is probably on a fool's errand. Even John Kerry, who again we were told had captured the "youth vote," couldn't overcome all the other voting blocs in Ohio, where the "youth vote" is abnormally large due to the abundance of college campuses. Indeed, whatever gains a candidate might receive by appealing to the 18-to-24-year-old crowd are probably lost by alienating the population that actually does vote.

Alice Fishburn