Hillary won in NH. So that’s what it is. The significant thing is that the youth vote was again a major factor. According to CIRCLE, the youth turnout rate more than doubled since 2004, rising to 43 percent compared to 18 percent in 2004 and 28 percent in 2000. More than that, among Democrats, 18- to 29-year-olds came out in greater percentages than older sets of voters, constituting a major voting bloc. According to CNN, 18- to 29-year-olds made up 18 percent of N.H. primary voters, 30- to 39-year-olds made up 15 percent and 65 and older voters made up 13 percent.

How did Hillary beat back the Obama momentum? Jane Fleming Kleeb, executive director of the Young Voter PAC, wrote a compelling press release, saying “Clinton came out of Iowa knowing she needed to target young people and ran an aggressive campaign among non-college youth.”

“Non-college youth”… They apparently came out for Hill and the college kids for Obama. Pop and Politics wants to know: How exactly did she target non-college youth? Why did she come to think non-college kids would support her over Obama? And if all of this is true, why did they? More on all that later, we hope.

Meantime McCain won, which seems a little like another vote for change on the Republican side, a “stop the madness” of the Bush years kind of vote, a back to honor and genuine military leadership and nontorture and anti-illegal detention and generally what we might now call “Constitutionalism,” or simply a semi-willingness to abide by the Law of the Land.

But Romney got second-most votes, again. He’s been second to two different candidates, which sort of makes him the unloved frontrunner, sort of, doesn’t it?

Last, with her win, the press has all kinds of reasons to publish hideous images of Hillary, which she supplies in abundance. Which, among other things, means young people have been seeing bad photos of Hillary Clinton for sixteen years, ie, for most of their waking lives. Which is partly why (the regular seeing of her not the regular seeing of hideous images of her) Hillary seems such an unlikely genuine change candidate. To get ahead at last of the tragic Bush years, it seems merely impulse to have to get ahead of the Clintons and all their baggage as well.

Update after the jump.

Jane Fleming Kleeb of Youth Voter called to shed light on the non-college youth vote garnered by Hillary. Kleeb’s organization has knowledge of the strategies of the Democratic candidates, she says, because it works closely with the youth directors at the Clinton, Edwards and Obama campaigns— the fact that all three have youth directors on staff, she adds, is amazing and great and telling. The Hillary campaign, according to Kleeb, sent out a “lit piece” or, in regular folk parlance, a door-to-door campaign pamphlet, in the days before the primary that specifically targeted “young working class voters” by directly addressing the economy. (”It’s the economy, stupid.”)

Kleeb doesn’t have a copy of the lit piece and hasn’t seen it, but would guess it talked about Hillary’s record on worker’s rights and job creation, basically about her experience and its being essential to bringing about the kind of change that can improve the lives of working people. In effect, it would have been the same pitch she made to the unions and why they essentially endorsed her candidacy. In the words of one union rep, who paraphrased similar campaign rhetoric: “Obama talks about hope. But you don’t hope for a paycheck. You work for a paycheck. And we need someone in there who’s gonna know how to work for us from day one.”

Kleeb on the lit piece: “I’m sure it was a lot about how she would be standing with them in the trenches, you know, and that Obama essentially has his head in the clouds, and so forth.”

Also Kleeb says not to underestimate the power of the crying, the tears, the misting up. “I think for sure it helped her with young professional women, that it gave her the bump there. Because they have those moments, too. It’s hard starting out in your career, getting taken seriously and getting a break. I think they thought: I’m gonna believe in her because I want people to believe in me. People go with their hearts in the last moments, when they’re in the booth, and I think that’s what happened.”

So did Hillary strip the emotional vote on some level from Obama? Could that be what we see going forward, more appeals from Hillary to emotion? “Will that kind of combination of factors translate to Michigan, Nevada and beyond? I don’t know. It seems fairly acute, particular. We’ll see.”

Tags: hillary clinton, new hampshire, primaries, youth