Informational Capital

Showing up to the polls in numbers well above 2000 and 2004 levels, voters under the age of 30 finally had a decisive say on who should be the next president. Exit polls sugest that approximately 2/3 of voters under the age of 30 voted for Obama [Exit Polls]

An estimated 24 million Americans ages 18 to 29 voted in this election, an increase in youth turnout by at least 2.2 million over 2004, reports CIRCLE, a non-partisan organization that promotes research on the political engagement of young Americans. That puts youth turnout somewhere between 49.3 and 54.5 percent, meaning 19 percent more young people voted this year than in 2004, estimates John Della Volpe, the director of polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics. And that’s a conservative estimate, Della Volpe says. Source Link

The increase in young voters helped to produce an estimated 8.3 - 8.4 million more young votes for Obama than for McCain. This margin is wider than Obama's overall popular vote victory margin (appx 7.5 million), suggesting that youth voters were the decisive factor in determining the outcome of the election.

For more informationa on the history of youth turnout, I suggest this post at FutureMajority.com