In the hours before his first presidential caucus, Zach Hernandez (24) sat at his office computer on Tuesday in St Paul, continually refreshing his profile on the Facebook networking site, watching the count of his fellow Obama supporters tick upward.

“Zach Hernandez is excited for Minnesota to vote for Obama!” he declared on his personal page.

The campaign of Barack Obama had been riding a surge of interest from young people, but whether that would translate into support at the polls was one of the great unknowns of Tuesday’s voting.

Interviews across the country on Tuesday produced anecdotal evidence that some younger people did carry their enthusiasm into the polling place.

At Spelman College, a historically black institution for women in Atlanta, where campaign signs for Hillary Clinton competed with photocopied Obama fliers, student after student said she would choose Obama in the voting. Others lobbied friends and parents with clips from boisterous Obama rallies.

“It’s very much our campaign,” said Stephanie Baker, a 19-year old New York University student from Delaware.

Since voting started in early January, Obama has become the Pied Piper of the Democratic race, walking off with a larger chunk of young voters than any other recent presidential candidate.

By contrast, when Americans ages 17 to 29 were asked last June in a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll if they were enthusiastic about any of the candidates running for president, Obama and Clinton tied for first place: 18 per cent for him, 17 per cent for her.

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