Talking About the Youth Vote

Kevin Bondelli has agreed to join the crew here at Future Majority. He'll be writing on Mondays (and I hope more frequently than that). If you like Kevin's writing, you can also check out his personal blog. I'll have a bio up for Kevin on the About page shortly. --Mike

Haven't you heard? A strange phenomenon has taken place in 2008: the youth vote has spontaneously materialized after years of non-existence. There must have been something in the water fountains on college campuses, or maybe Barack Obama has a magic flute, the pied piper of disinterested millenials. Nobody could have anticipated these levels of youth participation.

The previous paragraph pretty much sums up the general response of the media and political pundits to the record-shattering turnout of youth in this year's Democratic primaries and caucuses. They seem to be blind to the fact that youth turnout has been steadily increasing since 2002, largely due to the efforts of youth organizations like the Young Democrats of America, Young Voter PAC, the Hip Hop Caucus, and many others.

Over the years campaigns have ignored young voters because they were not likely to vote, and youth were not likely to vote because they were never contacted by campaigns. This self-fulfilling prophecy over the years had left many young people feeling ignored, unimportant, and helpless. Helpless because politicians were more likely to vote for things that were at the expense of young Americans over any other demographic due to the low risk of electoral consequences. The young activists that attempted to lobby against such actions were almost always unsuccessful, it being hard to recruit supporters when years of experience made such efforts seem futile, and with the elected officials convinced that the youth would once again fail to turn out in significant numbers.

Organizations like the Young Democrats of America knew that the American youth were not apathetic, only disengaged. Youth peer-to-peer programs were developed and it was confirmed by research that such programs were extremely effective at increasing youth turnout. The success of these programs led to increased funding of youth organizations, now seen as an important investment for the progressive movement. The increase in resources allowed youth organizations to implement their programs in more places and improve their methods from experience. More and more young people were getting engaged. The movement was building.

Organizations such as the Young Elected Officials Network and Young People For were recruiting and training young candidates to run for school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and even federal office. Young people who previously had no ties to politics were seeing their friends and peers running for office, and winning.

Campaigns had been unwilling to use its resources to contact young voters partially because of the relative cost and difficulty of successfully making contacts using traditional methods. Web 2.0 and social networking has dramatically lowered these barriers to contacting young voters. Peer-to-peer and word of mouth contact are facilitated by social networks such as Facebook and Myspace. The groups and events functions of these networks make it much easier for youth to organize themselves and recruit their friends. Youth organizations have been able to coordinate their offline and online efforts to reach a mass of young voters that would have not been possible without these advances in technology.

So finally we come to the question "Why is the increase of youth participation so dramatic in 2008?" First, as I illustrated in my previous paragraphs, the youth vote movement has been building up to this since 2002. Second, the failures of George W. Bush and the Republican Party combined with the quality of the Democratic candidates have motivated many young people into action. Third, the Presidential campaigns have learned from the successes of youth organizations. They hired youth outreach staff, addressed the issues that are most important to youth, created youth constituent groups within their campaigns, and have taken advantage of new media and social networking. Finally, the youth organizations that have been building this movement are stronger than ever.

We as young activists have to be careful not to fall into the trap of implying that the increases in voter turnout this year is only the result of a single campaign, or that 2008 is an anomaly. By not acknowledging the history of this movement, by allowing the youth vote to appear to be merely the characteristic of a single campaign, or by forgetting the youth turnout increases since 2002, we run the risk of inadvertently perpetuating the idea that the youth vote is an ephemeral phenomenon. 2008 is not a fluke, it is a culmination of years of effort and effective strategy, and the youth movement will continue to strengthen and build, from the primaries, to the general election, and onward.