Youth Vote 2008: Obama or Issues?

Earlier this week I posted two blog entries commenting on a post by Erica Williams pertaining to the current state of youth organizing. Erica made one final point that I'd still like to address:

Who are we kidding? Many people voted because of Obama. Deal with it. I think one of the main failures of youth vote advocates this election season was in the shallowness and transparency of our messaging. The message that “young people voted on the issues” never broke through to mainstream media because it frankly wasn’t true. It was a message set up to support our organizational missions and demand legitimacy and credibility not just for our constituency, but mostly for our own work. And I understand that. But there is a difference between saying that young people care about the issues – that is true – and that young people voted because they care about the issues – not true. You can care about issues and stay your butt home on the first Tuesday in November, particularly in our communities (young, black, latino, disenfranchised). Because guess what? Young people have always cared about not having clean air to breathe, or money in their pockets, or their loved ones at war. And while yes, the past 8 years have brought us to a boiling point, logic would not tell our communities that voting is the solution. Obama is what made them channel their frustration about the issues onto the ballot. And denying that reality is going to make tomorrow a cold blast of water when we go back to our newly registered voters and find out that they actually know very little about “the issues” or how those issues will really be changed.

Erica's comments are made in response to a specific conference of the Generational Alliance - a coalition of youth-centric organizations focused on electoral politics, policy, and leadership development. I didn't attend that conference so I don't know what specific comments she might be responding to. As such, I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with her here, but I would like to lay out my thinking on the relationship between Obama, policy issues, and increased voter turnout.

First, having worked in cooperation with a number of c4 and 527 groups during the election on their communications, I don't think it would be accurate to say that the message coming out of those organizations - or even any of the major c3s - was that "young people voted on the issues." The major themes coming out of most youth organizations and spokespersons this year were:

• Youth turnout is rising and that growth is a trend not a blip.
• Youth turnout is directly related to the quality and quantity of contacts they receive from campaigns and political organizations (aka - young people will participate if you ask them, and peer to peer engagement is the gold standard for making that ask).

A lot of time was also spent educating reporters about the proper way to interpret the youth turnout numbers on election day and avoid making the same mistakes in their coverage that were made in 2004. We can always have more media hits and more spokespeople on TV, but judging from the quality of stories I've read that echo these main points, I think we did a bang-up job this year in managing the media narrative around the youth vote.

Moving back to the question of whether or not "youth voted on the issues," I think that it's a little harder to disaggregate issues from Obama in the turnout equation than Erica's post suggests. Yes, it is possible to care about the issues and not vote. But those who do vote almost certainly care about the issues. And what exactly does it mean to say that "young people voted because of Obama?"

Nationally, 25% of young people who voted said they were contacted by the Obama campaign. That number climbed as high as 50 or 60% in battleground states. This was the peer to peer campaign (online and offline) that so many of us were pitching in our talking points, and for which we've pushed since early 2003. While I'm a firm believer that the medium (peer contacts, not media buys and robo calls) is more important than the message, these contacts didn't lack in content. They did in fact have a message, and that message was often issue based - touching on higher education costs, the lack of good jobs, the need for a green economy, and the desire to responsibly withdraw from Iraq. On the stump and in the debates, Obama frequently made direct appeals to young voters based on these issues, and on everything from the war to stem cell research young voters were presented with a clear choice between the two candidates.

The media may have lampooned the Obama campaign's celebrity power, but it's not like all these contacts, and all of Obama's stump appearances, amounted to nothing more than a call to "vote for me because I'm awesome." There was a little more substance than that, even if we junkies craved even more substance than was offered. Expecting more than that, I think, is unreasonable. The percentage of voters - among all age groups - who cast their ballots based on the minutia of policy are so small as to be an insignificant portion of the electorate. Using such a standard as a talking point to the media is, I think foolhardy (if in fact that was the message some orgs tried to send), but to rate the quality of youth involvement or the effectiveness of youth organizations on the policy knowledge of the electorate seems unfair.

Bottom line for me - yes they voted because of Obama, but they did so because he invested real resources in reaching out to them and engaging them in a peer to peer manner, and the content of that engagement spoke directly to the issues that are of concern to young people. That's exactly the message that many of us in youth organizing have been trying to get across since 2003.

(It's also worth noting that such young people did, in fact, exist):