Less than eight hours before polls open in Michigan tomorrow, Gov. Jennifer Granholm took the stage at the Michigan Union to rally students in support of Barack Obama.

While wearing a shirt bannered with "1.20.09" — the last day George W. Bush will serve as president — Granholm told the crowd of 600 University students that their votes are needed to put Barack Obama in the White House.

"This is your election," Granholm said. "You've got to prove them wrong when they say that young people don't vote. You've got to prove to them that your moment is now."

The rally, which brought several Michigan Democratic heavyweights to campus, was a call-to-arms, attempting to mobilize members of the country's most unreliable voting bloc: 18- to 24-year olds.

Behind the impassioned speeches and fervent applause is a lingering concern that this election will be just like the last one, and many before that, in which Democratic candidates have counted on young voters to buck the trend and show up the polls on Election Day, only to discover that those votes never materialized.

For older Americans, the Bush presidency is one of many they've seen in their adult lives. For college juniors, the Bush presidency is almost all they know. He was first elected when they were in middle school.

Political Science Prof. Michael Traugott, who studies political polls and surveys, said the Democratic focus on younger voters has not proven effective in the past, but people between the ages of 18 and 24 support Obama over Republican nominee John McCain by a 2-to-1 margin.

"The Democrats in particular have been interested in adding young people to the rolls by getting them registered and then getting them to the polls," Traugott said. "This has not been historically a successful strategy."

In every election since 1972 — the first presidential election after the passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 — turnout among those aged 18-24 has trailed that of voters aged 25 years and older by about 20 percent, according to The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

Traugott attributes the lackluster youth turnout to the fact that the policies and proposals championed by major-party candidates do not necessarily affect voters in that age group.

"Most young people aren't paying property taxes, they don't own homes, they don't have kids in school," he said. "Their attachments to the community are weaker."

But that was also the case in 1960, when the presidential bid of John F. Kennedy energized America's youth and ignited a decade of political activism.

Many have made the parallel between Kennedy and Obama. Both young, progressive and with larger than life rhetoric, Kennedy and Obama had cozy relationships with young voters.

John Kingdon, a professor emeritus of political science, said the fundamentals of this election, like President Bush's unpopularity, and the explicit appeal to young voters from Obama's campaign could allow the Illinois Senator to disprove the longstanding political theory of young voter aparthy.

"It looks as though Obama actually will stimulate young people to turn out at the polls," he said. "More than they have in the past, and more than they did when Kennedy was running."

But the political engagement of today's youth is not that surprising.

This is a generation that watched the events of September 11, 2001 in middle school, formed their political opinions under the leadership of a single president and will now enter the job market facing this nation's worst economic climate since the Great Depression. Many argue, like Kingdon, that this will be the year for America's youth to head to the polls in record numbers. Obama's counting on it.

His campaign has focused on making an ambivalent voting bloc viable for the first time in modern American politics, and sought their support in ways no campaign has ever done before.