Alex Merchant, 18, a senior at St. George’s School, Middletown, is head of the Young Liberals and student body president. He organized a group of students to travel yesterday to Hampton, N.H., to support Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

MIDDLETOWN — High schooler Alex Merchant missed his economics, pre-calculus and AP biology classes yesterday, but you won’t hear him complaining.

Instead of hitting the books, Merchant and 13 other St. George’s School students left early yesterday morning for an in-the-trenches civics lesson: volunteering for Barack Obama’s campaign during the all-day New Hampshire presidential primary.

The students’ faculty adviser, Kevin Held, drove the group in a school minibus plastered with Obama signs to Hampton, N.H., where they met with Obama organizers and split up to man the phones at a campaign office there, tote signs at a polling place or go door-to-door reminding supporters to cast votes.

It was a dream trip for Merchant, an ardent Obama supporter who’s turned 18 just in time to vote in his first primary next month.

“It’s been great — a lot of hard work and I think everyone is tired, but no one’s complaining,” Merchant said by phone from the Hampton campaign office late yesterday afternoon, noting that exit polls showed his pick was leading the Democratic field.

Merchant, a senior from New York and Pennsylvania, and the school’s prefect, or student-body president, leads “SG for Barack Obama 08,” a student group of about 40 supporting the Illinois senator’s bid for the White House.

Although some of the group are not yet old enough to vote, they were “totally pumped,” for the trip, Merchant said, especially after watching Obama clinch last week’s Iowa caucuses.

Merchant says he spent his recent school vacation poring over political coverage and staying “glued” to CNN and MSNBC during coverage of Iowa. At school, he follows politics when he’s not studying, running cross-country, editing the student newspaper or attending drama rehearsals.

Merchant says he was first impressed by Obama when the lawmaker delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The more he learned about Obama, the more he liked.

Last spring, Merchant started recruiting his peers, and the group has become the most active political organization on St. George’s campus, says school spokeswoman Suzanne M. Hadfield.

“I just think he’s a very inspiring man,” Merchant said of Obama. “I think the experience he has is pretty adequate. He has a backbone and a really good character; sometimes people underestimate how important that is when you’re trying to get things done.”

Politics is a hot topic on campus these days, with the semifinal round of a mock presidential debate planned for tomorrow night, Hadfield said. Twenty-six students will take on the roles of the Republican and Democratic frontrunners and battle it out on the top issues. A recent, but small, poll in the student newspaper, The Red & White, found that most faculty consider themselves liberal, while more than half of the 75 student respondents say they’re more conservative than liberal.

By dinnertime last night, Merchant’s group boarded the bus back to Middletown.

Merchant says the hardest part of organizing yesterday’s trip was convincing school officials to let the students miss classes for the day. But there was no way of getting out of their evening commitment: 8 p.m. mandatory study hall.

That means these young Obama supporters had to watch from their dorm rooms as Sen. Hillary Clinton pulled away to victory.

mwims@projo.com