Trio in College May Hold Key Votes for Democrats

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The Wall Street Journal

Trio in College May Hold Key Votes for Democrats
By SARA MURRAY
April 16, 2008; Page A5

WASHINGTON -- While most of the Democratic Party's superdelegates are members of Congress, governors or senior party officials, Awais Khaleel, Lauren Wolfe and Jason Rae are still in college. Yet the votes of the three student superdelegates might help decide the Democratic nominee. As members of the Democratic National Committee, they are included among the 800 or so superdelegates to the party's national convention in Denver Aug. 25-28, and they have made it their mission to represent young voters. The trio are unlikely members of this group of accidental powerbrokers who increasingly appear to hold the balance of power in the race for the nomination. DNC officials think they probably are the only college-student superdelegates.

Young people "aren't aware of the fact that we have superdelegates like myself who grew up with them in middle-class families and go to public universities and are financing their own education," says Mr. Khaleel, a 23-year-old political-science student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Ms. Wolfe, 25, a University of Detroit Mercy law student, are vice president and president, respectively, of the College Democrats of America, an organization that works with campaigns to reach out to young voters and since 1993 has held DNC seats.

With chances growing that the superdelegates might choose the nominee, Ms. Wolfe says she tries not to focus on the responsibility, putting her efforts instead into organizing young voters and hoping some compromise can be reached. Both she and Mr. Khaleel say they won't endorse a nominee until the primaries and caucuses have ended in June. Only a few DNC slots are allocated to groups like the College Democrats of America. The majority of the 410 DNC superdelegates were elected by their state parties. Such was the case with Mr. Rae, a 21-year-old Marquette University student who has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama.

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The three student superdelegates talk with young voters about issues like health care and the economy, they review the campaigns' outreach efforts -- and then they study for their exams. Ms. Wolfe says her inbox is crammed with email from young people expressing their candidate preference. Mr. Khaleel says some students tell him they are worried about finding a job when they graduate; others worry about whether they will be able to afford college. Many young voters either know someone serving in Iraq or have served there themselves. But none of the three was prepared for the increased attention superdelegates have received recently as their potentially critical role has emerged. "When I got involved with it, I thought I would be attending a couple meetings in D.C. every couple months," Mr. Rae says. Instead, they have had to juggle exams and classes with, for example, phone calls from Sens. Obama and Hillary Clinton or coffee with Chelsea Clinton.

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