registration

The October 2009 CIRCLE report has been released about college students and voting. Here are some of the findings:

• Students can be diligent voters with high turnout, both by absentee ballot and in local voting.
• Students who can vote in their home state or their college state are strongly influenced in that choice by the closeness of the presidential election.
• Even in the internet era, in-person voter drives reach many students who would not otherwise vote.

The report was based on a peer-to-peer voter drive done at Northwestern University during the 2008 election. During this voting drive, campaigners encouraged students from Presidential swing states to register back home as opposed to in Illinois. Students contacted by the campaign chose to register back home and vote absentee instead of locally by an 8:1 ratio. Of the students that registered through the drive, 80% voted.

I have mixed feelings about encouraging students to vote absentee over locally. For most students, the political decisions that are going to have the greatest effect on their lives will be made at the state and local level in their college district. State legislatures decide university funding, and that in turn determines tuition increases. City ordinances can have a big effect on students. Back when I represented students at Arizona State a number of student-opposed measures were passed through the Tempe City Council.

Encouraging students to vote back home in a swing state makes sense to the Presidential campaign, but it has it's cost in other political areas. I'm also concerned that this sends a message that the only really important election is the Presidential one every four years and discourages students from building the habit of voting locally and being an active and engaged part of the civic community.

The drive at Northwestern University, analyzed here, offered each student a choice of registering for local voting in Illinois (the college state) or for absentee voting in their home state. Absentee voting was encouraged for students from swing states. Students from non-swing states were mildly encouraged to vote in Illinois. Students from swing states showed a dramatic preference for absentee voting in their home state, over local voting in Illinois, by an 8:1 ratio. Even students from other non-swing states preferred absentee voting in their home state over local voting in Illinois by a 2:1 ratio.

What is troubling is that the students that were contacted that were not from swing states were only mildly encouraged to register locally. Once again this appears to be a situation where the campaign only cares about the Presidential election and ignores the importance of local races. While at the Presidential level it makes sense for people to vote in swing states, it doesn't make sense to not strongly encourage students to register locally when neither state is highly contested.

On the bright side, the campaign showed that students are reliable voters when engaged by campaigns, most effectively through peer-to-peer contact. It also showed that absentee voting drives are possible and can be effective.

A troubling finding of the report is that absentee voting is error-prone:

16% of applicants for absentee voting were not enabled to vote. In 1/3 of these cases, an error was made by the applicant, and in 2/3 of the cases the error was made by county boards of elections. Most errors by applicants could be prevented by adding minor annotations to the application forms.

However, even with the errors the success rate of the campaign was extremely high.

There is a lot of good information in the report, as well as an evaluation of the methods used by the absentee voter drive campaign. It's definitely a must read for people involved in organizing college students.

I'll end with a question for the comments: what are your thoughts on where students should be encouraged to register and vote?

• The recession is hitting young adults the hardest with disappearing jobs, shrinking wages, vanishing benefits, massive credit card debt...need I say more?
• The National Journal profiles Joe Rospars, Obama's young new media director.
• Check out how to track social media anayltics.
• Young advocates call for a framing shift on Waxman Bill.
• Check out OpenLeft's coverage of revamping voter registration to reduce disparities in the electorate.

Pew Research has a new report: Young Voters in the 2008 Election. The details of the report read like they were ripped right from the blog posts here at Future Majority - I could get used to that.

If you are interested in demographic data on the 2008 youth vote, there's lots of good stuff in the report, including breakouts by income, education, race, religiosity, gender and party ID. The long and short being that, among 18 - 29 year olds, Obama won all racial, gender, and socioeconomic demographics, including white non-college males. The only group that he lost, according to the data, is self-identified young Republicans.

Beyond demographics, there were two findings in the research that I thought were noteworthy in that I hadn't seen them reported anywhere else. The first was this breakdown of the Democratic youth vote margin compared to the overall Democratic vote over the past three decades. We've touched on that data here (see the graphs on the sidebar), though we've never compared them side by side in this format. It really highlights how significant and unusual young voter's support for Obama is historically:

The second item I wanted to highlight, and to my mind the most interesting/new item in the data, is the vast difference in contact rates by the campaigns.

Nationally, 25% of young voters reported being contacted at some point by the Obama campaign, compared to just 13% for John McCain. In crucial swing states, that gap climbed as high as 35%. Back in 2007 and early 2008, I was worried that "maverick" John McCain, ubiquitous guest on the Daily Show, spotted in such movies as Wedding Crashers; a candidate who did quite well in his appearance at the MTV/MySpace Dialogue, would make a play for the youth vote. Maybe it was a function of the youth energy surrounding Obama's campaign by the time McCain emerged from the primaries. Maybe it was a function of McCain's smaller campaign budget and lack of a coherent field operation. But it looks like the Maverick completely ceded the playing field to Sen. Obama when it came to young voters. He didn't even try.

Looking at the contact rates for older cohorts, it looks like McCain had his hands full just trying to compete with Obama among his base - voters over 65 who were the only age demographic to choose him over Sen. Obama.

Pew notes that this disparity in contact rate accounted for a significant difference at the polls, and hits upon one of our favorite talking points here at Future Majority (emphasis mine):

But the electoral influence of young voters also depends on efforts made to mobilize them. According to the exit polls, young voters in key battleground states this year were far more likely to have been contacted by the Obama campaign than by the McCain campaign - and in some states they were more likely than older voters to have been contacted, a significant reversal from past patterns.

Nationally, a quarter of voters (25%) 18-29 say someone contacted them in person or by phone on behalf of the Obama campaign about coming out to vote. By contrast, just 13% were contacted by the McCain campaign. In 2004, nearly the same share of young voters was reached by the Kerry campaign (22%) as was reached by the Bush campaign (19%).

But the disparity was much larger in some of the key battleground states. In Pennsylvania and Nevada, which Obama carried by double-digit margins, more than half of voters under age 30 said they were contacted by the Obama campaign (54% in Pennsylvania and 61% in Nevada). The McCain campaign reached considerably fewer young voters in those states -- 30% in Pennsylvania and 26% in Nevada. Obama's get-out-the-vote operation also reached three times as many young voters as McCain's operation in Indiana (45% vs. 15%) and twice as many in Florida (32% vs. 16%).

The curious thing about the data is that, despite incredibly high contact rates for young voters, major swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida actually saw a significant decline in share among young voters. In those three states - almost the holy trinity of Presidential Politics, youth share of the electorate dropped 4%, 4%, and 3% respectively over 2004 levels.

The most obvious reason I can think of behind this dramatic underperformance is disinterest and disillusionment among young McCain supporters. Lacking any significant contact or encouragement from their candidate - who spent his final weeks on the trail shoring up Red States - perhaps they turned out in far lower numbers than in the more closely contested 2004 race. If those young conservatives sat it out on election day, and older voters turned out in greater numbers than usual, that might account for the rather dramatic decrease in youth share in those states.

Whatever the cause - and I'm sure it is something we'll be returning to again and again in the coming months as more data creeps out - this is great information from PEW proving once again that outreach to young voters works. Not only can it move votes, it can win elections.

In addition to their excellent fact sheet on voter registration and election laws earlier today, CIRCLE also released a fact sheet providing the definitive data on youth turnout in 2000 and 2004, and youth demographic data for 2008. The page also links to an interactive flash map that breaks the youth vote turnout data down on a state by state basis.

Every reporter, blogger, and youth advocate should have this page bookmarked.

And here are the demographic breakdowns of the youth vote for 2000, 2004, and 2008:

Last week we hit back at ABC and John Stossel pretty hard over their willful misrepresentations of the youth vote as "too dumb to vote." Today, over at the Rock the Vote blog, Kat Barr has an excellent piece posted about another youth vote meme that is taking hold in the media: young people register in droves, but then fail to vote.

Like so many other media narratives about the youth vote, this just isn't true. Here's what Kat has to say:

Now, when I read that, I got suspicious. I know that in 2004, 81.6% of registered 18-29 year olds voted, a turnout rate not low by any definition.

Of course, not all of those were new voters, so I decided to check it out a bit further.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2004:

* 83.3% of registered 18-year-olds voted;
* 79% of registered 19-year-olds voted;
* 81% of registered 20-year-olds voted;
* 82.3% of registered 21-year-olds voted.

Nearly all of these voters were "new" by virtue of age, and all were new to a presidential election.

What's the lesson? Whether young or new, or young and new, if a person is registered to vote, they are very likely to cast a ballot.

So to all the skeptics I want to say - knock it off! You're telling the easy story, the "will those darn kids really vote?" - but not the factual story. Don't believe me, believe the facts: you can be sure that those darn kids will indeed overwhelm the polls come November 4th.

You read that right - over 80% of registered youth voted on election day in 2004. Here's what that looks like in graph form, across the entire electorate (click for a larger image. Courtesy of Chris Kennedy, also of Rock the Vote.):

Kat's last point can't be stressed enough. Most journalists are telling the easy story, not the factual story. The vast majority of young voters who are registered to vote show up and cast a ballot on election day. As I wrote in The Nation back in August, lower than average turnout at the polls among young voters is about access, not apathy:

Young voters face more barriers to participating in the political process than any other demographic in the electorate except perhaps ex-felons. Some of these factors are structural and can be attributed to lifestyle issues. Others are deliberate attempts to keep young voters from the polls. Here's a look at how our voting system disenfranchises our youngest citizens:

[...]

Contrast all this to the situation of an older voter. Older voters have had many more opportunities to register. They are generally stationary, having put down roots in a community and thus do not need to change their registration. They have conveniently located polling places with short wait times. Their residency or eligibility is rarely challenged, and campaigns spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each cycle to reach out and encourage older voters to go to the polls. Is it any wonder that youth turnout lags behind?

Look at this problem from a marketing perspective. If you were Nike and you were selling a sneaker, you would do whatever it took to get your product in front of your target audience, get them into the store, and buy your product. You wouldn't ignore your target market and then whine about the fact that no one was buying your shoes. The same is true for young people and voting. If we want them to get to the polls, we have to put our resources behind efforts to register them, and we have to make our product (voting/democracy) readily and easily available to them.

Once registered, young voters show up in numbers comparable to the rest of the electorate. That's why all of these new voters that Obama is bringing into the system matter so much - because it is highly likely that 80% or more of those newly registered voters will turnout on November 4th.

This is why the work of all the groups Kat highlights was important in 2004, and it's why the work of groups like Rock the Vote, HeadCount, the Bus Federation, YDA, and The League are so vital in this election cycle, and will continue to be so in the future. They increase access for young people in what can often be an intimidating and occasionally opaque system. It's also why, coming off a winning electoral season, I'd like to see a lot of energy thrown behind Election Day Registration initiatives in more states to increase the ease with which young people can register and participate in the political process.

hey everyone. Its good to finally join the Future Majority Blog community. My name is Dan Levin and it is my pleasure to serve as President of the College Democrats of NY: http://www.collegedemsny.com In what has been our mast active year ever of expansion, growth and activity, we have made our presence felt throughout the state and in the northeast. We encourage you to read our blog posts to see what we've been up to and stay in touch.

Results from voter registration drives from college democrat chapters across the state. Below are totals of new registered voters by college dems members below:
Chapter Voter Reg #
Binghamton 1400
Brockport 250
Oswego 512
niagara 438
stony brook 1500
NYU 924
Columbia 200
Fredonia 1060
st. johns 634
Corning 76
Albany law 30
Yeshiva U. 195
Sarah Lawrence 360
Bard 400
st. lawrence 350
Hartwick 150

Total so far: 8,479 new registered voters
more results still coming...

A press release from the Student PIRGs just hit my inbox. In the next week, 29 states will reach their voter registration deadlines. As we know from previous elections, at least 70% of registered youth will actually cast their ballots on election day. Getting a high young voter turnout/share of the electorate depends on making sure as many youth as possible are registered now, before those deadlines hit.

Here's what the student PIRGs are doing this week:

The Student PIRGs are running student voter mobilization efforts on 150 campuses in 24 states this fall. Campuses that will see a last push this week to register student voters include:

University of Colorado (Boulder, CO)
University of Colorado (Denver, CO)
Colorado State University (Fort Collins, CO)
University of Northern Colorado (Greeley, CO)
University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
University of Southern Florida (Tampa, FL)
Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL)
Temple University (Philadelphia, PA)
Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH)
Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH)
Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)
University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ)
Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff, AZ)
Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ)
Arizona State University – West (Phoenix, AZ)
Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)
Meramec Community College (St Louis, MO)
North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC)
University of Washington (Seattle, WA)
Green River Community College (Auburn, WA)
University of Montana (Missoula, MT)

What are you doing?

We talk a lot here about the importance of field work and peer to peer campaigning as the gold standard for getting people to the polls. But what exactly does that mean and why, in the day to day operations of a campaign is it important? How does it work and how does it fit into the internal workings of a well-run campaign?

If you've ever asked yourself these questions, you need to go read this piece at FiveThirtyEight.com explaining the importance of "voter contacts":

The other day, after Jonathan Martin wrote a piece that suggested John McCain’s field campaign was moving up closer into competition, we wrote that if Martin’s reporting is accurate with McCain's numbers, the state of the organizing race is now something more like a 35-to-1 edge for Obama rather than the 567-to-1 edge it held earlier in the summer. That’s not a field office edge or number of organizers edge, that’s the voter contacts edge, and both ratios are absurd.

Despite publishing an inside scoop on Obama’s Ohio numbers, our piece didn’t make much noise. But it’s not because the numbers aren’t shocking – they are – it’s because reporters and most people don’t really understand how to put voter contacts in context. Marc Ambinder will note that the Obama campaign has “preternatural self-confidence" about its strategy, but that confidence has to come from some type of hard data.

So let’s explain what voter contacts are, and what they are not. A voter contact occurs whenever someone from a campaign – organizer or volunteer – collects information from a voter about candidate preference or indecision, party preference (strong, lean, independent), or important issues to that voter in making the ultimate choice between candidates. A contact would ideally get an answer on all these questions to qualify as a contact, but even if the voter is only able or willing to give some meaningful data feedback, that counts. It takes about 4 attempts for every 1 contact, or roughly 25%.

Every bit of information gleaned helps the campaign make choices about how to target these voters for further messaging and GOTV. A strong Obama supporter will be targeted for volunteer work, early voting and/or GOTV. A strong McCain supporter will likely be ignored. A voter who describes herself as normally a Republican but who is undecided in this race and has health care as a critical issue will be targeted with persuasion mail pieces and/or person-to-person contacts about each candidate’s health care positions and voting records.

In case you missed it . . .

• A loophole in Ohio voting law that will allow for one-stop registration and voting this fall could be a huge boon to Obama (and young voters) in the state.
• Yesterday activists launched a campaign on Facebook against Evan Bayh as the potential VP pick called 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh. You would already know this if you were friends with Future Majority on Facebook.
• Huckabee youth group "Huck's Army" is now recruiting for McCain.
• Future Majority friend, activist, and videographer "noneck" Noel Hidalgo was deported from China this week for filming protests in Tiananmen Square. Noel and his crew might be following me around during the DNC convention producing video for FM. Let's hope it doesn't get quite so dicey in Denver.
• Jared Polis won his primary in Colorado and will go on to become the next Democratic congressman in his district. Not only that, he is the first openly gay candidate elected to congress and he may well be one of - if not the - youngest congressman in the country. I'm proud to have had Jared as a guest in our live blog series. Congrats to him and everyone who worked on the campaign.
• I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but in the next few days, Barack Obama will announce his VP nominee via text message. This was a great idea on their part. They probably received thousands of cell phone numbers that can now be used to get out the vote in November via text.
• The New York Times has more on that in Garret Graff's op-ed about text messaging in the Presidential campaign.
• Blender asked the candidates about their favorite songs. John McCain - what happened to Usher? I thought he was your favorite artist?
• The Washington Post has the skinny on the hottest parties at the DNC.
• In Nevada, a 22 year old is running against an incumbent state Senator who has held office since 14 years before his challenger was born.
• The Wall Street Journal finally picked up on James Fowler's study of the Colbert Bump.
• Generation Vote has a put together a Youth policy platform.
• The Post Chronicle has some thoughts about what Obama's youth supporters need to do post-election day.
• Tom Friedman actually wrote a decent piece about McCain's energy policy.
• It's Getting Hot in Here explains the whole "Gang of 10" energy compromise and why it's a win for Obama.
• David Burstein of 18 in '08 explains the significance of just one vote.
• Medill reports that this may be the geekiest of all conventions.
• Wow: