turnout

Like a lot of people who work somewhere in the general orbit of politics, I often find myself playing the role of low-budget pundit with friends and acquaintances.

"How's the election looking?" they ask. "Who's going to be the running mate?" "What big October surprises do we have in store?"

Honestly I kind of suck at punditry. Answering damn near every question with "who the hell knows" probably won't get you invited back as a talking head on CNN, and a careful analysis of the possibilities doesn't really seem to thrill a party crowd gathered around the punch bowl.

I'm ok with that. Anyone who claims to have all the answers is probably as full of it as the TV pundits anyway.

But there is one question that I get asked that really ticks me off -- not because it's a bad question, but because I don't have a good answer.

That question: "What else can I do?"

I know tons of people, of all ages, who really care about the outcome of this election, and who want to "help." But they don't really know how.

For young people who can afford to do it, there are definitely some jump-in-with-both-feet options, like volunteering or working full time for a campaign, or hooking up with the League of Young Voters (where I work), or taking a trip with Swing Semester, or getting involved with one of the great "young progressive" organizations on the right column of this website.

But when it comes to young people who need to work full time, or people in my parents and grandparents generation, or even my peers in their 30's or 40's, the options thin out a little bit.

Everyone knows they can donate money. That's a good thing to do, and it's important. But it's only sorta satisfying, and reduces a person's potential talent and energy to all the creativity and skill of having a credit card.

Sure, I could tell people to volunteer at a local campaign office. That's definitely important. Sometimes that can even be fun or satisfying. And sometimes it stinks.

I could tell them to get out there and make phone calls or knock on doors. That can be enjoyable sometimes, when you're not feeling apologetic being the guy on the other end of those phone calls and front porch visits we all "love" so much. After trying it once, plenty of people have no interest in a return engagement.

Donating, stuffing envelopes, phone banking, or knocking doors. Are those really the best ways we can offer people to engage?

The truth is, the way most election work is done these days is shockingly inefficient. The amount of time and money that campaigns end up spending in ineffective ways is staggering. We have to play the game because it's the best option we've got right now. But if you step back and summon a little perspective about the way voters are identified and turned out, you quickly figure out that we're still just emerging from the prehistoric age here.

There has to be a better way. I've been thinking about it and I've got some ideas about how we might be able to step back a bit, think outside the box, and figure out how to use the massive well of talent and energy that's out there from people of all ages.

I hope other people are hard at work at the same task. There's a lot of powerful passion, energy, and skill out there to be tapped, and we're only just at the beginning of learning how to do it. Holler if you're down to help, and let's get to it.

--------------------
Sam Dorman is the Managing Director of the League of Young Voters

Two things in need of debunking today. First, Sarah informs me that Newsweek reporter Christopher Dickey was on Talk of the Nation today making scurrilous claims about 2004 youth turnout. When a caller asked him about the youth vote and their potential impact in November, here's what he had to say (paraphrase):

Dickey:"No, because young people don't vote"
Talk of the Nation: "Well they sure came out in primaries and caucuses this year"
Dickey: "Well they did but they were so bothered by Bush in 2004 but they failed to elect John Kerry... "

As all of you know, young people increased their vote by 4.3 million and their turnout rose from 40 to 49% over 2000 levels. They were also the only age demographic to vote for John Kerry, favoring the Democrat 54 - 45% over President Bush.

Resting the entire election on the shoulders of a single demographic is a dishonest and unfair analysis. As a friend and colleague of mine likes to say "the youth vote never turns out until they do. And even then it wasn't enough." Damned if you do, damned if you don't, aye Mr. Dickey?

If you have time, write Mr. Dickey a friendly email stating just that. His email address is shadowland [at] newsweek [dot] com.

Second, the delusional College Republicans hang their hat on a single poll by Zogby (of all people) to claim that McCain is starting to take the youth vote away from Obama:

However, a new ATV/ Zogby poll shows that is not the case, and that McCain’s support among young voters is increasing rapidly. The poll says that “McCain gained 20% and Obama lost 16% among voters ages 18-29.” Obama still leads among young voters 49%-38%, but with the way his support has been increasing, we might see McCain becoming very competitive for the youth vote soon.

This poll just goes to show that you shouldn’t believe all the hype. Young people all across America are getting excited for John McCain and the GOP, and will turn out in large numbers for our candidates in the fall.

I wouldn't put nearly so much faith in Zogby. He's notoriously inaccurate and with only ~1,000 respondents in the whole poll, his data on young voters probably has a ridiculously high margin of error. Add in the fact that he used landlines, and so probably missed a lot of low-income and Latino "cell only" users (who are also young) makes me think even less of his results.

And besides. 49% - 38%? If you assume a margin of error of even 5% points, that could put the race for young voters at 54 - 33%, not too far off from the Dem vs. Repub congressional results in the 2006 wave election. I'll take that margin anyday.

CIRCLE has finally released their fact sheet summary of youth turnout in the presidential primary contests. The numbers are much the same as what we reported last week. Here's what you need to know:

• In the states for which data is available, 6.5 million young voters (17 - 29) participated in either the Democratic or Republican Presidential primaries.
• Overall turnout rose from 9% (recorded in 2000, the last comparable cycle), to 17%.
• This is the third consecutive cycle in which youth turnout increased.
• This is the first time youth turnout has increased three cycles in a row since 18 - 20 year olds were first granted the right to vote in 1971.
• In the 17 states for which comparable exit polling is available from 2000, all but one state (New York) saw an increase in youth turnout.
• Of those 17 states, 10 saw at least a 10 point jump in youth turnout (NH, MA, GA, MO, TX, TN, IA, MS, OH, OK).
• Obama captured the Democratic youth vote 60 - 38%.

Also remember from the Rock the Vote's fact sheet and last week's post mortem that young voter's share of the electorate rose from 9.4% in 2004 to 14.3% in 2008, and young voters participated in the Democratic primary over the GOP primary at a rate of 2 - 1.

The most interesting piece of new data in the CIRCLE report is the candidate breakdown in the GOP contest. More young Republicans voted against John McCain than voted for him, and he barely inched out Mike Huckabee to capture a plurality of youth votes among the top 4 candidates. As for Ron Paul - the so-called GOP youth candidate, he only received 10% of the youth vote. Can we finally put to rest the fiction that Ron Paul is the conservative youth candidate? At best he had a highly tech savvy core of youth supporters that amounted to very little at the polls.

It was reported yesterday that Congressman Paul is holding his own "shadow convention" this year. It will be interesting to see who shows up.

I'm guest blogging for The Nation for the next month. I'll be posting 3 - 4 posts per week, some of which will be cross-posted here.

My first piece went up today. It's a rebuttal to that Paul Maslin piece in Salon last week:

For as long as I've been involved in youth organizing (about five years now), our most difficult adversary has been the press. During the 2004 election, the media over-hyped the circus that was P. Diddy's "Vote or Die," while ignoring the real work on the ground done by groups with far less star power (and consequently a smaller draw for a rag looking to sell papers or pull in eyeballs). After the election, despite large gains made in youth turnout and participation, the media largely botched its analysis by falsely declared the youth vote – once again – little more than electoral vaporware.

It's been one of the great victories for the youth organizing community this cycle that the media narrative has finally – and surprisingly, accurately – turned in our favor. Which is why I was hugely disappointed this weekend to read a piece in Salon written by Democratic pollster and fellow Deaniac Paul Maslin that proclaimed the youth vote to be "not that big of a deal."

To be fair, Maslin gets it right when he says that youth turnout is about more than Obama. The increases we've seen are a long time in coming and are due to a confluence of factors including: the increased size and natural engagement of the Millennials generation, over four years of organizing work in the field and online to engage young voters on the part of progressive youth organizers, and a real devotion of time and campaign resources on the part of the Democratic Presidential candidates.

But Maslin gets it wrong when he tries to lay blame for Kerry's loss at the feet of young people. Voters under 30 not only increased their turnout in larger numbers than any other age demographic in 2004, they were also the only age demographic to vote for John Kerry over President Bush. Maslin's thinking is common among youth-vote critics who clutch to a nonsensical binary world-view that a friend of mine summed-up rather aptly: "Everyone expects young people to fail until they succeed, and then they didn't succeed enough."

Read the rest here.

For a number of reasons, I'd like to revisit the data on college turnout vs. non-college turnout that I blurbed on Thursday. First, to note that I've spoken with some people and cleared up the confusion of the precise definition of "non-college" youth. The term non-college applies to anyone who has not attended or received a degree from an institution of higher education. It does not, as the NPR story seemed to suggest, apply to graduates not longer in school.

Looking at the data once again in that light, I have to agree with Karlo that the disparities are shocking. 79 percent of young voters this cycle are college youth and just 21 percent are classified as non-college. When you consider that In 2007, only 18 percent of 18-29 year olds had a B.A. or more, it does not seem outlandish to suggest that we're seeing some version of the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) playing out in the youth vote surge.

CIRCLE notes that one cause for these disparities is inequality in high school education, particularly opportunities to learn about politics:

Instead of making things more equal, school systems exacerbate this political inequality by providing more opportunities to learn about politics to higher income students, white students, and academically successful students, according to a new CIRCLE study written by Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh of the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) at Mills College. Students in higher-income school districts are up to twice as likely as those from average-income districts to learn how laws are made and how Congress works, for example. They are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to report having political debates and panel discussions.

Over at WireTap, Karlo Marcelo of CIRCLE has some good suggestions on how we can alleviate these disparities:

We need to address this gap now -- during this election -- and while the emphasis on the internet and online organizing is effective this year in delivering information about the voting process to college youth, it leaves out non-college youth, whose voices need the most amplification. Complicating outreach tactics even more, places that were once venues for mobilizing non-college youth, such as unions, and community organizations, are less effective today because of declining membership rates.

One way to engage non-college youth, in the long term, is to improve access to and affordability of college; but not everyone wants to attend. For those young people that do not want to attend college -- or can't afford or access it -- the focus needs to turn to high school civic education. A new CIRCLE working paper found that students in higher-income school districts are twice as likely as those from average-income districts to learn how laws are made and how Congress works. More than that, they are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to report having political debates and panel discussions.

The implication being that there is a direct correlation between this kind of early civics education and voting habits. I'm in full agreement with Karlo that all youth should receive the same quality of civics education in high school, but I would go further. We also need to create new institutions that can fill in the role previously played by those unions and community organizations.

As David Sirota wrote in his recent columen, The New Permanent Campaign, political involvement can't just spool up at the height of an election cycle and then disappear for the next four years. That doesn't build anything and offers little in the way of real, substantial involvement. Progressives need to put serious thought into creating institutions that involve progressives 24/7/365. Progressive donors should invest in nontraditional outreach like that provided by Drinking Liberally and Democrats Work, and the creation of healthy, state-based youth organizations with a focus on reaching non-college youth.

Typically these types of organizations are the least funded institutions in the progressive movement. Real investment in these types of organizations - combined with research into best practices for such groups - would also go a long way towards brining non-college youth to the voting booth and into the progressive movement.

Over at MTV I explore the question of young Superdelegates and if they are following the trends of the 2008 youth vote.

Read the full post here: www.chooseorlose.com

There is a lot of talk about young voter turnout and about Superdelegates these days. Young people have emerged as a critical bloc of voters. The media, candidates and many naysayers of the youth vote are finally giving them and the issues they care about attention on the campaign trail.

It got me thinking—are the young Superdelegates following the trends of young voters and how much has the youth vote increased this year?*

I decided to take a look at all the primary and caucus states that have voted so far in order to get a good sense as to the young voter trends—increase in turnout, preference of candidate, preference of Party—and then compare that to the Superdelegates under 36 that have come out as “pledged” to a certain candidate.

Trends of Party Preference: The Shift to Democrats

Young people are overwhelmingly going for Democrats this election cycle, following a trend since 2000. Mike Connery, a blogger over at Future Majority, put together this nifty graphic that shows the growing Democratic advantage among young people.

As you can see, already in 2008, young people are voting 65% for Democrats and only 34% for Republicans (it’s actually up to 68% now since a few more states have come in after Mike created this graph as you will see later in this post).

Democrats have a 31% vote advantage headed into the Presidential elections not to mention all the down ballot races for Senate, House of Representative, Mayor, etc. this will affect.

While this is great news for the Democrats, it is not so good news for Republicans. But--and a big but at that--Democrats should be forewarned. Republicans had the youth vote during the Reagan years. Almost 60% of the young people then voted for Republicans and continued to vote for Republicans as a bloc of voters.

However, Republicans stopped talking to future groups of young people and it shows now in their numbers. If Democrats want a lasting majority, they need to continue targeted programs at young people or risk losing a big chunk of the electorate in the future. While young people make up about 21% of the electorate now, they will be 30% of the electorate by 2012 and that is a bloc of voters that can very easily swing elections.

State by State Breakdown: Over 4 Million Strong and Growing

Across the board young people have increased their votes in almost every state except in NY there was no increase. The average number of young people voting in a state in 2004 was 46,373. The average in this election cycle is 174,646. That is more than tripling the number of votes cast for 18-29 year olds. This is remarkable since many youth voting experts could have predicted a 15-20% jump, but no one predicted a 200% plus jump.

Read the full post here: www.chooseorlose.com

Jane Fleming Kleeb is the Executive Director of the Young Voter PAC which helps Democratic candidates and State Parties win with the 18-35 year-old vote through endorsements, on-the-ground support, training, strategy and money. She is a regular on Fox and is part of MTV’s Street Team ‘08 representing Nebraska.

Update: For final results and a more complete version of the chart below, go here.
-------------------------------

I'm getting ready to head down to The Tank for their Super Fat Tuesday party.

Use this as an open thread to discuss the results and what you are seeing in the states.

Around 9pm Eastern time I'll be heading home to start blogging the results. After that, I don't plan on going to sleep until the whole chart (below) is complete.

Warning: numbers subject to change as CNN updates their polling data.

Update: As of midnight, the first draft of this chart is online. I'll now go back and start updating as CNN updates their exit polls.

Update: The chart is now current as of 1am.

Update: CNN hasn't updated their polling in the last hour, and none of the state parties aside from Alabama have posted vote totals, so I think this has gone as far as I can take it tonight.

A few thoughts - Most important, in every state for which I have comparative data, the youth turnout as a share of the electorate increased by anywhere from 1 - 7 percent. That is HUGE.

Second, Obama, for the most part, maintained his lead over Clinton among young voters. The exception was in states that Clinton dominated. Also interesting - no state with EDR had exit or entrance polling, so those comparisons I wanted to do are moot for now.

I'll be back on early tomorrow, updating the data, and hopefully finding out more data. I don't know when CIRCLE is planning on releasing their numbers, but as soon as they do, I'll post about it.

I'm beat. 'Till tomorrow.

In anticipation for today's Super (Fat) Tuesday contests in 22 states, I've pulled together some baseline data for each state. Unfortunately, it's not much.

I've looked over the 2004 exit polls from CNN and pulled out the share of the electorate for youth where possible. Unfortunately there isn't even that much data for a lot of states. I've also made a note as to which states have some form of Election Day Registration. It will be interesting to compare turnout in EDR vs. non-EDR states.

Later tonight I'll repost this chart and fill in turnout, share of the electorate, and data on each candidate's youth support as much as I am able. Hopefully that will be a useful substitute until CIRCLE can finish the monster task of crunching data from all 22 states.

After putting out the question of Hillary's youth "victory" to a number of smart youth organizers, I'm getting a better picture of what I think happened in the state and how to interpret Florida youth turnout. First the final numbers from CIRCLE (pdf):

• 151,599 young voters participated in the Florida Democratic primary.
• They were 9 percent of the Democratic electorate, an increase of 3 percentage points from 2004, when young voters were 6 percent of the electorate.
• The actual turnout rate in the Democratic contest was 13 percent, up from 4 percent in 2000.
• Young Democrats once again out performed Young Republicans. 134,412 young voters participated in the more competitive Republican Primary, and they made up 7 percent of the Republican electorate.

The organizers I spoke to gave a number of reasons for Hillary's victory among young voters:

• Higher name ID
• Clinton's big lead among Latino voters
• Clinton spoke about Florida enough in the final week to have "virtually" campaigned in the state
• Clinton's blow-out lead discouraged Obama voters
• W/r/t to the Michigan comparison, there was a concerted effort in Michigan on behalf of "uncommitted." No such grassroots push existed in Florida for Obama

These are all plausible enough, and to be honest I don't think we can get much more clarity at this point.

There are a few things Florida does tell us, though. Tony Cani, the Political Director of YDA dragged me out of the horse-race narrative I've sunk into, and pointed out that Florida tells us a lot about what's going on with the youth vote sans the Obama campaign.

Even though Obama is capitalizing on a huge wave of youth support, increased voter turnout among youth was occurring even before his campaign. Obama may be riding the youth wave, and he is certainly amplifying it, but in no way did he create it. It existed before him, as we saw in 2004 and 2006. As I noted above, youth turnout in Florida yesterday tripled over turnout rates for 2000, without any outreach by the campaigns, and it did so more for the Democrats than the Republicans.

Second, this offers further proof of what youth vote advocates have been saying for literally years now: reaching out to young voters works. In all the states where the campaigns have made an effort, youth turnout has risen dramatically, nowhere more so than in Iowa and New Hampshire where the campaigns invested the most effort. Putting resources into the youth vote works. That's a lesson for all Democratic campaigns - national, state and local - to take away from yesterday's results.

What will be the youth vote narrative come January 4th? It's not an easy question to answer, and indeed it's something that can and will be shaped in large part by a number of factors: the caucus results, historical data, conventional wisdom about past caucuses, the campaigns themselves as they spin the results, and youth advocates.

Here's a run-down on what I see as the variables in play that could affect how the youth story is reported. I've loosely ranked them in terms of how important/influential I think they are.

This is a long one. Join me on the flip.