Poll: Palin Pick Fails to Sway Younger Voters

John McCain likes to shoot from the hip. He's a "maverick," after all, a politician full of surprises.

But McCain's surprise choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate hasn't won over the skeptics, including a number of prominent conservative commentators. Palin has also failed to win over younger voters, according to a new poll.

Here's a summary of the poll results from AFP:

The choice by Republican presidential candidate John McCain of 44-year-old Sarah Palin as his running mate failed to woo young voters and even turned some of them off McCain, a Harvard University pollster said Wednesday.

"During the vice presidential selection process, I took a lot of phone calls from reporters, pundits and campaign people who thought the Palin pick was going to re-energize the youth vote and get young people to take a second look at McCain," John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard's Institute of Politics, told reporters.

"We now have data that indicate that the choice of Palin didn't help and probably hurt the Republican ticket," he said, as he presented the findings of a poll on young voters' attitudes.