Youth Voting

I am enthralled with Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). 
 
He has made news lately with suspicions of joining Barack Obama as a possible Vice President or cabinet member or at the very least giving Obama an endorsement for President. 
 
Chuck Hagel had me watching him long before the media picked up on his independent spirit of leadership.  Time magazine has given him the label of “hero to liberals” even though he has a strong Republican voting record in the Senate.
 
So, when I found out Chuck Hagel was in Lincoln to sign his new book “America Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers” I had to go check him out.  He greeted each one of the over 500 people there with such true joy; he is made to be in politics.  He loves politics.

I first read an interview with Senator Hagel in a magazine called Nebraska Life.  After several pages of learning about him growing up in the Sandhills of Nebraska, he said something that grabbed me, something that made me realize he is both a man of conviction but also a dreamer.  He said:
 
“You run for office because you want to influence policy, to influence the direction of the country; you attempt to attain to some power to exert that influence, to change the course of the world. This business should be about one thing, making a better world for all people.”
 
I asked Senator Hagel about this quote at his book signing, here is what he had to say:

 
With all the speculation around Senator Hagel joining the Obama team as a possible choice for Vice President or a cabinet member, I was curious to know how he viewed his campaign so far—in particular around the youth vote since in his book he dedicates a chapter to talking about his own kids who are in high school being more engaged in their community, a show of his knowledge that the Millennials are a different generation.  He gives props to Obama while talking about how critical it is for young people to be engaged at high levels in politics:
 

 
Lastly, in Senator Hagel’s book he talks about the health care crisis facing America.  Since young people are the number one age group among the uninsured, I was curious to know about one particular part of health care—mental health parity.  I wanted to know Senator Hagel’s perspective on why mental health parity has yet to pass both the Senate and the House, here is his explanation:
 

 
Nebraska was lucky to have Chuck Hagel as our Senator for the past 11 years.  While he is retiring this year, and there is a competitive race for his seat, he will be greatly missed.  Although, I don’t think we will have to wait that long to see Senator Hagel take on a new post in politics.  He simply loves it too much and it is clear this is a true calling for him.

PS: Thank you to Senator Chuck Hagel’s staff, especially his Chief of Staff Mike Buttry, who made sure the Senator answered all of my questions even though they had plenty more events to attend that night.

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 MSNBC.

November 6^th--Election Day 2007--is just around the corner for folks in many states. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be convinced to target young people to vote in the upcoming elections. If you still need convincing, you might want to check out an article in the Politico that laid out some statistics.

The bottom line is if you target and talk to young people they will vote. Not rocket science, true enough. But with Election Day looming for many campaign staffers, volunteers and candidates, the Young Voter PAC thought we would offer up 5 activities that your campaign can do to get 18-35 year-olds to the polls. Don’t fret if you have not started targeting young voters yet. You still have time since many young people, and yes even older voters, don’t pay attention until right at the end.

Each idea below is linked to an organization that has done these activities many times and they should be looked to as a resource for more detailed information and sample materials. Don’t reinvent the wheel, young voter groups like those below, are here as a resource.

1. Go Trick or Voting. Get a bunch of volunteers and your candidate and head to neighborhood streets and community Halloween parties. Create signs saying “Don’t Be Tricked By (insert other candidate’s name), Vote (insert your candidate’s name)” and have volunteers carry the signs. You can even make old-school sandwich boards for volunteers to wear. Get volunteers to dress up as famous Democrats or people that highlight progressive issues that the campaign has focused on during the election cycle (e.g. nurses and doctors to symbolize health care for all). Use this Halloween holiday as a creative time to reiterate your message, get some earned media and increase visibility.
2. Create “Pledge to Vote” cards. Research (and common sense) tells us that if a young person “pledges” to vote they vote in higher numbers. Groups like YDA and the PIRGs have been using pledge cards for years and it works. Simply create the pledge to vote cards and arm your volunteers with clipboards. Create fun contest to have them compete with one another to get as many pledge cards in a few hours. Use the information on the pledge cards (make sure you get name, email, cell, address) to contact young voters before and on Election Day.
3. Do a bar crawl. You can also choose to do a coffee house crawl, an elementary school crawl, a supermarket crawl….you get the point. Any place where 18-35 year-olds hang out in your targeted areas is where you want to send the candidate and a group of energetic volunteers. Make sure you all wear campaign t-shirts and bring quarter-sheet sized information flyers about your candidate. When you go to places where young people hang out, they don’t want to lug around a big pamphlet, so all you need to do is use some text from existing lit, give it a younger spin and create it so there are 4 flyers per page. Make sure the info sheets on your candidate have the date of the election, where someone can find their polling location and the number to call if they face problems voting. You can even bring “Pledge to Vote” cards to the bar crawl to make the crawl more effective since this way you will have contact information of the young voters you talked to for GOTV.
4. Make a Voter Guide. We all get busy and can’t keep up with the candidates and ballot initiatives that are happening on Election Day. Make it easy for young voters and create a voter guide that lists who/what to vote for and why. Leave the voter guides at places like coffee shops, college cafeterias and people’s door steps. You can also hand them out as people are headed home from work and school in heavy trafficked areas like bus stops, metro centers, schools and supermarkets.
5. Throw a Party at the Polls. Why not make polling locations fun. Bring food, music, signs, candidate lit, balloons, just about anything to make it fun and welcoming. We forget that voting can at times be intimidating. Placing volunteers at polls, especially those that are populated with a lot of young people, and making the atmosphere fun can increase the likelihood of a young voter stopping and going in to vote.

Above all else, keep young people on your GOTV call and walk list.

Resources get tight in the last days of an election, but the biggest mistake your campaign will make is to cut young people from your GOTV lists. Campaigns usually cut young voters because they have no vote history or they don’t have the frequency of voting as older voters. Think in terms of a young voter—this may be their first eligible election so of course they have no vote history...yet! Go against the grain and leave young voters on your lists.

When trying to get young people to the polls, you must throw out the conventional wisdom of “young people don’t vote.” Young people don’t vote at the same rate as older voters  because they are not targeted. Talk to young voters and they will vote. Having other young people and the candidate do the asking and information giving is even better. Don’t attempt to do all of the above in the last week of the election, but at least try one of the activities. Your volunteers and fellow staffers will get a refreshing break from other campaign activities and your candidate just might win because of the youth vote in the process.

Want More?
In addition to the organizations linked to above, check out the Pink Bunnies project by Forward Montana and creative ads by New Era Colorado. Both are innovative state-based organizations targeting young voters.

For links to research and case studies visit www.youngvoterpac.org
or go right to www.rockthevote.com/research/ and download “Young Voter Mobilization Tactics I and II.” All of the guides on Rock the Vote’s site highlight best practices and research by respected young voter researchers and pollsters including Celinda Lake, David Nickerson, Donald Green and Alan Gerber.

Since when did it become the thing to do to hate on young people? This week the NYTimes has posted three articles the first saying we are meaningless non-voters the second Criticizing us for "delaying" things like marriage and permanent employment... And finally today's saying we're doing our civic duty but we're doing it all wrong because its too quite.

Generation FU needs to get off our backs.

Thomas Friedman begins today's piece all about exploring colleges and how confused he is.

"The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Old Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them."

Why are these things all our burden? Why is it that the mistakes of Generation FU (aka 40+) suddenly require us to rise up and blow things up like some kind of psycho. I don't want to get tortured by Dick Cheney do you?

So we look at what is practical - what works, what will become a longterm investment in our future. I don't need to point out that we hold absolutely no cards at this stage in the game. We do not have representation to the youth in the White House, the closest person to our age in the US Senate is 40, and the 30 something Caucus has a hand full of people in it who I've never seen talk to us about ways to work together....

Wouldn't it be a smarter means of rebellion to create lasting, meaningful, revolution that is embedded into the culture rather than a short term hell raising weekend that just energizes our opposition and creates another counter-culture yuppy movement in our history??

As Mike Connery just said to me

"doesn't it make more sense for us to work towards gaining that power as quickly as possible rather than wasting our time in useless gestures and symbolism?"

A few weeks ago the winner was announced in an essay contest run by the New York Times. The winner was responding to an essay by Rick Perlstein called "What's the Matter with College," another anti-youth piece run that made the argument that young people need to rise up.

The winner, Nicholas Handler, says

"On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt."

As Mike Connery said so eloquently in an email to me - there is activism out there - it just takes on different forms.

"Al Gore and Friedman want us standing in front of bulldozers, but what does that accomplish? Protest is pretty dead as a viable form of activism. We're working within the system to change it. "

Friedman is quick to smackdown the internet as a "too quiet" form of revolution and goes on to say:

"Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual."

You can see just how old fashioned Mr. Friedman himself is. I didn't find Thomas Friedman on facebook. But I did find a special group called "Thomas Friedman: Bigoted Fool" that I joined right away... you know, to show my activism.

Mike says "the accomplishments of the blogosphere aren't symbolic, and FaceBook can be a valuable recruiting tool for youth nonprofit organizations that do real work. All of that builds power for young people in our public debate, and all of this is in addition to (not in place of), the work we are doing to build careers where we can push for socially responsible business."

If you further examine some of the sites we quote on here such as the National Conference on Citizenship Report (NcoC) with CIRCLE and Saguaro Seminar (Harvard). (page 17) that discusses "netizens," which are citizens are active online, you'll find further refutation to Friedman's thesis:

"Contrary to predictions that the Internet might replace face-to-face participation, the survey finds no trade off. In fact, the netizens are much more likely than other people to attend public meetings in which there was discussion of community affairs (38 percent versus 23 percent), attend a club meeting (72 percent versus 47 percent) or take part in a protest or demonstration (31 percent versus 15 percent)."

My assumption is that these Generation FU writers are too disconnected, too out of touch, and too old to recognize progress, rebellion, and meaningful action even with their bifocal lenses. Perhaps they should spend time talking to their kids about websites rather than having us just fix their computers the same way they want us to fix the society they screwed up. Perhaps they should spend more time talking to us about what we are doing rather than assuming it isn't well thought, well planned, or well organized before they pass judgment based clearly on ignorance.

Handler's piece ends as a well worded response to Friedman by saying

"College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words."

Ever since 2004, those of us who have been involved in youth outreach have been annoyed, to put it mildly, by the constant parroting of the lie that young people are apathetic, and that they will not vote. No matter how many studies came out, no matter how many experts debunk this myth, and despite the fact that the last two elections showed a pretty significant upswing in young voters, the media seemed determined to parrot talking points that claimed that young people were not worth doing outreach towards, and many campaigns seemed to go right along. Well, it looks like we may finally have turned the corner in regards to this meme, as Time Magazine featured an article last week titled Reaching Out Early for the Youth Vote.

Even in a presidential campaign that has started as early as this one, Heather Smith couldn't have expected she would already be so busy. But "my phone started ringing the day after midterms and it hasn't stopped ringing since," says Smith, 30, the executive director of Young Voter Strategies (YVS). Her non-partisan organization, which she founded after the 2004 election with funding help from Pew and George Washington University, analyzes how to best mobilize young voters. That section of the electorate has traditionally been treated as an afterthought until weeks before the actual voting. But this time around top presidential contenders and political strategists are starting to focus early on the youth vote.
...
Smith's tips could be more important than ever in 2008. After more than a decade of declining or stagnating numbers, turnout among voters under age 30 increased by almost 5 million in 2004 and almost 2 million in 2006. Voting experts say this is because a new generation has come of age — the Millienials — and they are more civically engaged young adults than so-called GenXers were during the 1990s. The Millenial Generation — those born between 1979 and 1994 — is also three times the size of Generation X. They've voted Democratic in the last two elections and according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll released in late June, they plan to again in 2008. That poll found that 54% of voters under age 30 say they intend to vote Democratic. But 40% of young adults ages 18 to 24 describe themselves as Independents, according to an April poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics. Because of that, Smith says Republicans could still win the youth vote in 2008.

Welcome to the real world, Time Magazine! I hope you enjoy your stay!

I guess my only real question at this point is: why haven't our phones been ringing off the hooks?

My only question in regards to the article has to do with this quote:

"Nobody in either party thinks that the youth vote is not worth paying serious attention to and spending money on programs to get them registered and turned out."

Really? I mean, I know that there are a few good progressive groups out there giving pretty heavily to youth outreach programs, but the Democratic Party seems pretty incapable of reaching out to a younger audience. But hell, maybe they've turned that corner too.

In about five minutes I'm jumping in a car and heading down to DC to attend the Take Back America 2007 Conference. I'm going to try and do one or two "live-blogs" from there, though that will depend a bit on getting some free time. Either way, if you're reading this, and you're attending the conference and would like to meet up, let me know in comments. If you're in DC, but not planning on going to the conference, you should still come out to the Drinking/Living Liberally parties. There's one on both Monday and Tuesday night.

Update 1: I'm heading to a panel on youth voting right now. I'll see how it goes.

Update 2: Fred and I have added some comments on the conference below.

Update 3 (by mike): Here's our own Alex UA talking to the Dodd campaign about student loan transparency and reaching out to young voters:

In today's New York Times, Janet Elder writes about youth voting and outreach for the 2008 cycle. She posits that in this election candidates are "putting a lot of energy into courting the youth vote", which apparently consists of putting links on your site to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, as well as *gasp* hiring "youth vote coordinators to mobilize young voters." I know it's shocking that multi-million dollar campaigns would devote an entire staff member to youth outreach, but apparently it's true.

But what will come of all of this energy? Well, according to Elder's magic 8 ball "Outlook not so good."

But Web links and vote coordinators aside, are voters under the age of 25 going to turn out in record numbers? History suggests it is unlikely.

Eighteen year-olds cast ballots for president for the first time in 1972, following the ratification of the 26th amendment. Nearly 50 percent of 18-24 year olds voted. Since then, turnout among this age group has varied.

The only evidence that Elder provides is the difference in voting in the two Clinton elections (1992 and 1996). She also seems to recognize the reason in the steep dropoff- that young voters didn't think their issues were being addressed in 1996, as opposed to 1992 when there was some excitement around Clinton's candidacy and the "hope" that it provided. I was too young to vote in 92, and I did vote for Clinton in 96 (or at least tried, via an absentee ballot, since I was living in Israel at the time) but I, for one, certainly fell into that group.

As the article notes:

Michael McDonald, professor of government and politics at George Mason University “Turnout among young voters or any group with traditionally low participation depends a lot on how interesting the election itself is.”

I know it is shocking to think that people only vote when they feel that it is relevant and important, but maybe if campaigns started devoting more time and energy on tackling the problems that young people care about. And what do young people care about?

In addition to the war and the desire to change the direction of the country, young voters say they are worried about getting their working lives started. They are concerned about jobs, the economy and healthcare. Ms. Lake, the Democratic pollster said that in her research, young voters place “economic issues like college affordability ahead of the war.”

So maybe the candidates should spend less time putting up "web links" (which I suppose is old person speak for a hyperlink) and spend more time passing legislation that aims to ease the burden being placed on the backs of our generation.

Last week Mike pointed to a new publication released by CIRCLE and Young Voter Strategies. The paper that they released, titled What Works: Getting Young Voters to the Polls (PDF). When I first read the study I was pretty focused on the parts having to do with the value of face-to-face/personalized contact, the cost effective nature of youth outreach, as well as the finding that when it comes to getting young people to the polls, the medium is more important then the message (in other words, contacting voters increases voting equally, no matter what the message is). Yesterday I was reading the blog of Peter Levine, Director of CIRCLE, and while reading his post which discusses the Young Voter Guide I found this passage:

3. Despite repeated efforts to find more effective messages, it appears that the medium matters, not the message. For example, if you organize a phone bank, it doesn't matter whether your callers use positive or negative scripts, simply provide information, or invoke civic duty. I find this a strange result, because calling someone is a communicative act, and I would think that what is communicated would matter. But perhaps the very fact that people are contacted makes them feel valued and encourages them to vote.

I asked Peter to clarify whether any of these studies also looked at how people vote, and he responded that the measure that these studies used was voting, and voting only. None of these studies looked at either how the message or messengers effected the way that the people who got to the polls voted. This has important implications for outreach campaigns, and may indicate why the efforts of America Coming Together and the other big outreach groups failed to lead to a Democratic victory in 2006. It also ads some ammunition to the controversy brewing over the horrendous behavior of PIRG clone Grassroots Campaign, Inc. and the other for-profit "progressive" human resource firms. How so? Find out after the jump...

The Ohio Method

Despite the final outcome, those who participated in VoteMob and Downtown for Democracy saw the profound effect of peer-to-peer outreach paired with innovative data, media and targeting strategies.  By throwing parties, hitting the bars, canvassing clubs, and going anywhere we thought there may be young voters we were able to compile a list of 130,000 young voters-  we registered over 10,000 alone.  Our persistence paid off.  In Columbus turn out increased among VoteMob contacts by 30.1%-  around 76% of our registered contacts turned out-  we beat overall turnout (including the old folks) by 6% and we beat under 30 turnout by 17.3%.  Regular campaigns celebrate if they move the needle 5%, let alone 30%.  (Thanks to Drew at WayPoint Data Solutions for running the anlysis).  In some precincts the Democratic vote was an astounding 187% higher. More importantly, there was no correspondent increase in Republican turnout.  In terms of raw numbers in our targeted precincts statewide, 4 new Democratic voters made it to the polls for every new Republican added, demonstrating that our targeted efforts helped to increase the margin for the Democrats and deny any comparable advantage to the Republicans.  While final reports of turnout are being completed in Ohio, the results in Columbus are indicative of our performance statewide:

While we were not operating in a vacuum, we were the group that had primary responsibility for these precincts and the demographic as a whole.  Through regional and statewide coordination with other 527’s in the America Votes coalition, we divvied up the precincts so as not to duplicate efforts.  While we spoke to many young voters who resided outside these precincts, our most comprehensive effort was exercised in these precincts, utilizing the full range of new and traditional field strategies.  

How we did it

These unprecedented increases can be attributed to our innovations in voter targeting, data collection, media and phone strategies.  Our first step was to delay door-to-door canvassing until the fall.  We began operating in mid-June and realized that the vast majority of residents in our targeted college precincts were not in residence and had probably moved from their last address after the spring semester.  In addition, any information collected during the summer in canvassing efforts would likely be inaccurate come the fall.  The data we were able to pull from the ACT Van was therefore outdated.  Subsequent acquisition of “fresher” databases from NPG and Blaemeier by 21st Century Democrats proved wasteful as the lag in updates and difficulty of matching incoming data made the platforms and lists as unhelpful as the ACT Van. By the fall, I had designed an online database and recruited a programmer to build a platform that allowed us to query the incoming data from the field.  Our database, VoterTrak, proved considerably more reliable and cost effective than any provided by national vendors.  We were able to tailor an online data entry form to simplify entry of collected data.  Then we wrote queries within our data parameters and targeted our on-campus and precinct voters by generating updated and accurate dorm and precinct walk lists.  

Summer Strategy

We decided to concentrate all of our efforts on site-based voter education, persuasion and registration efforts.  We began scouring Cleveland and Columbus for venues frequented by young voters.  Our outreach efforts fell under three categories; night life venues, major events, and day shifts.  The day shifts were the hardest to fill due to the difficulty of finding a fresh supply of high traffic areas frequented by youth.  Parks, rec centers, bus stops, shopping districts, and lunch hour eateries proved to be the best targets, but yielded fewer contacts per hour than night life venues and large events.  Informal agreements with clubs and bars allowed our Mobbers free access to shows and bars where they could work the crowds freely.  When we were not allowed entry to a venue, we would canvass the patrons as they came and went or lined up for shows.  Maintaining a consistent contact rate and avoiding saturation of friendly venues were the greatest challenges we faced utilizing this method. 

Regardless, by Sept. 14th we were able to talk to 50,810 young voters, collecting 35,649 cell and telephone numbers and 26,781 emails during the process.  Gathering current cell numbers and emails greatly increased our ability to follow up with those we spoke to, regardless of whether their address changed between our initial contact and Election Day.  

Fall Strategy

By late September, we had additional phone lines installed in the Columbus and Cleveland offices, expanding our ability to follow-up with voters.  We classed our contacts in different groups according to their party preference and began verifying the registration status of our hard and likely supporters, calling the undecided voters to persuade them based on their issue preference and confirm their registration status, and identifying potential problem voters-  mainly contacts that excluded information from their registration form.  For more detail on the phone strategy, please see the endnotes.

In the fall we instituted our campus program.  Throughout the summer we had been recruiting campus and dorm captains to head our efforts and assist in the execution of our field plans on 13 campuses with a total population of 174,205 students.  Our strategy differed from campus to campus.  By taking into consideration the make-up of the student population and the residency patterns on a given campus, we were able to create and fill positions according to the particular needs of the institution.   For example, on commuter campuses, we did not focus on the surrounding precincts and there were no dorm populations so our organizers focused on reaching out to existent groups and focusing on transit points on and around the campuses.  Our follow-up efforts on commuter campuses were limited to second face-to-face encounters on campus and phone and email contacts.  

The two greatest challenges in campus organizing were maintaining accountability for campus based organizers and maintaining access to the campuses.  The daily reporting structure we used during the summer proved insufficient for tracking campus activity.  As we developed our on-line database and the capability to track data entry via ISP addresses, it became apparent that several organizers were not entering sufficient fresh data nor recruiting the needed volunteers.  University students proved to be the least reliable work force.  Many well-intentioned students found themselves over-committed, and others simply failed to carry through on their obligations.  This resulted in strategic shifts at individual universities.  New on-campus organizers were hired, or greater responsibility for on-campus contacts was delegated to full time, non-enrolled organizers.  Students who worked for us during the summer proved to be the most reliable enrolled organizers in the fall.  More dynamic, digitalized methods of data collection would increase accountability for organizers who are not based in an office.  
 
Maintaining access to campuses was challenging at some institutions.  Partisan political speech is effectively banned at some private universities, and canvassing within dorms is often not tolerated.  Recruiting dorm captains that lived in targeted residence halls was one way to circumvent restrictions.  Enrolled volunteers also founded university chapters of Vote Mob, insuring our ability to cover campus events and recruit volunteers directly.  However, if a college decides to exclude an organization from their campus, organizers may be restricted to canvassing the surrounding business districts and residential areas.  The legality of such exclusion is questionable but, due to our compressed schedule in Ohio during the ’04 election, exploration of legal recourse was impractical.  There is a dire need for further legal advocacy to protect free speech and voting rights for students at colleges and universities nationally.  This extends to the chronic shortage of polling booths in university precincts.  In my view, this pattern constitutes systematic disenfranchisement as lines at several institutions across Ohio lasted 2 or more hours.  In on case in Knox County, college voters were reportedly waiting 8 hours to cast their votes.

Volunteers

Key to our efforts was volunteers.  Locally, we developed good bases, but relied on large influxes from out-of-state, particularly New York.  We also organized volunteer phone banks at firms and residences on the East Coast.  Downtown for Democracy began bussing in volunteers from New York in late August and continued through Election Day.  By the end, they had sent (#?) volunteers to Ohio. 

The typical trip began Thursday night, the volunteers arriving in Ohio on Friday morning, put through training and put into the field or on the phones.  Housing was provided, and we tried to provide breakfast and lunch.  A party was usually held on Friday or Saturday night in conjunction with the volunteer trips.  We wrapped with feedback sessions where we tried to guage the success of our program in facilitating the volunteers and insuring they felt the work they were doing was effective.  Our focus on accommodation, training, entertainment and communication provided for a rewarding volunteer experience for most of those involved.  Volunteers returned repeatedly from late summer until Election Day.
 
Approaching young voters in bars and music venues where they were more open to discuss politics than when at home, and having the tools to persuade and educate them proved very appealing to our volunteers.  They were especially encouraged when we informed them that peer-to-peer contact had been proven to increase youth turnout by 20%.

Leadership

As state director, I encouraged initiative within the parameters that were set and a constant re-evaluation of our strategy and targeting.  The full amount of funding never materialized, and the budget was in constant flux, so any inefficiency in the program had to be dealt with immediately. The disparities between the cities and campuses required initiative on the part of regional organizers and consultation with headquarters in order to arrive at the appropriate approach for each locale and campus.  Because we were dealing with a highly transient population and did not knock on doors until the final weeks of the campaign, regional organizers had to determine where and when to target young voters.  The flexibility of the organization and emphasis on initiative was especially effective in giving a sense of ownership and empowerment to the organizers.  Budgets were alloted and it was up to the organizers to insure that we were using every penny as effectively as possible.  Daily reporting allowed me to see red flags and track the performance of individual canvassers, but if goals were met and the numbers looked good, I tried not to micromanage.  

Examples of initiative expanded beyond targeting.  For example, regional variations in the scripts were incorporated and changes in the parameters of the campus program were instituted on a college by college basis.  Jackie Bray, who had far more campus organizing experience than I, took the lead on determining which campuses would be best to start out with.  Jayson, a seasoned canvasser, devised his own method to create accurate walk lists because we could not cut reliable ones from any of the vendor databases.  Alex River and I devised parameters and SQL queries that allowed us to hone in on voters that would have been turned away from the polls or forced to vote provisionally.  

In a traditional campaign with pre-collected data, the outreach strategy remains static.  You are given a list, you call and knock, you update the status of the voters in terms of their candidate support, and you do your best to build your hard count for GOTV.  The only dynamism is in which lists you run and contact, and that is often decided solely by headquarters.  Mobbers had to figure out where youth were, what bands would have a conservative crowd, which venues would yield more contacts, etc.   By relying on a dynamic, site-based strategy organizers came to know their constituencies extremely well and the greater ownership of their efforts was reflected in the quality of the conversations that were going on in the bars, on the phone, or at the park.  It was truly inspiring, and the end result is manifest in our returns.  

As Alex Rivers said, everyone accomplished at least one impossible thing because they really felt responsible and empowered.  It is imperative to the future of the party that young leaders and organizers are given leverage and are encouraged to be creative-  far more talented individuals will stay in the party and eschew more lucrative pursuits.  The best companies aggressively recruit talent and cultivate it, rewarding effort and initiative.  In Democratic politics you kill yourself carrying out the orders of one or two higher ups, and you are rewarded with poverty wages and no support network after the polls are closed.  If you don’t have a trust fund and want to stay in the game, you go and temp or live with mom and dad and try to cultivate your connections so you can go back at it again.  Many talented organizers drop out of the game because the financial and personal hardship of campaign life is exacerbated by the free-fall scenarios that follow elections.  Many distinctly untalented organizers and operatives are pushed along because they have the financial means  or connections to hang around, not because they are good.  Look at the Kerry campaign.  Everyone asked what VoteMob was going to do after the election, how they could stay involved-  all I could tell them was that it wouldn’t exist as we knew it and that everything in Ohio would shutdown.  Even though work was expected after the election, November 2nd was the last day most of my organizers were paid.

This is the third installment of my thesis, Keys to a Future Majority. Click here for the introduction, here for the second piece, and here for the third piece.

In my last post I looked at autobiographical and collective memory research, which demonstrated the phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. These studies showed that the easiest memories for people to retrieve are either those that happened recently, or those that happened during the "critical period" of their development, roughly between the ages of 16 and 26. But, some of you still may be thinking- "so what that these people can remember some things easier than others? What does this have to do with politics and Music for America"

Well, it has a lot to do with politics, and in order to explain why I'm going to turn to media effects research and decision-making theories.

The "Agenda-Setting Effect" and Priming

Every day tens-of-millions of Americans turn to some form of news to find out what's going on in the world. Naturally, many social scientists have asked the question "What effect does watching the news have on those who watch it" Media researchers have come to find that the most powerful media effect is not the ability to tell you what to think, but rather what to think about. In order to clear up what is meant by this statement I'll turn to a series of experiments which looked at what effect the news has on us. These experiments were conducted mainly by Shanto Iyengar, who is currently the director of Stanford University's Political Communications Lab.

In these experiments Iyengar and his colleagues would bring people into a lab, which was usually made to look and feel like a normal living room, and have them watch the nightly news. The experiments were carried out using one of two methods.
In the first method, Iyengar forced the subject to view, in a single sitting, a collection of different news stories that weren't necessarily from the same period of time. Subjects were told that the news they were being shown represented a sample of the current news. At the end of the viewing the subjects were asked to list which issues were the most pressing and they were also asked to evaluate how good of a job the President of the United States was doing.

Iyengar's second method had subjects watch the news at the lab for three to five days in a row. At the end of each day they answered similar questions as those who participated in the first experiment. What the subjects did not know was the researchers had slightly altered the news that half of them watched, discreetly inserting stories which had to do with some specific issue. The researchers might insert stories about the environment, civil rights issues, crime, or any other issue which the experimenters chose. This method was considered more naturalistic, while the first was considered more controlled, however both methods produced similar results.

What Iyengar found throughout his experiments were two significant effects, which are known as the agenda-setting effect and priming. The agenda-setting effect is also sometimes referred to as ‘framing', however I won't use the term here however so as not to confuse the agenda-setting effect with the notion of framing put forth by people such as the linguist George Lakoff. While "lakoffian" framing focuses on the images that certain words or phrases bring to mind, the agenda-setting effect refers to the ability of the media to affect which issues that a person sees as most important. If Iyengar and his colleagues had inserted stories about the environment, for example, the subjects would be much more likely to give the environment as the most pressing political issue of the day. This is what is meant by the news being able to tell you "what to think about." If you want to test out this theory on your own, try listening to the conversations that your friends or family have and ask yourself this question: how many of the events that your family or friends are talking about relate to something going on in the news at that moment? I'm sure you'll find that most of it will have to do with something that the media chose to highlight in the past few days.

Not everyone is affected equally by the agenda-setting effect. People belonging to social groups which were directly affected by the issue that Iyengar chose to insert would give that issue as the most important faster than people who didn't belong to the affected group. For example, if Iyengar highlighted the issue of discrimination, African-Americans would mention discrimination after one session while Whites start to exhibit the agenda-setting effect after two or three sessions.

But what effect does this have on our political beliefs and behaviors? Iyengar and his colleagues found that the issues they chose to highlight had a profound effect on their subject's evaluations of the president and the political parties. This effect is known as priming, and it refers to the abilities of the agenda-setting effect of the news to affect subsequent evaluations of the President and the political parties. Priming in turn affects the chances that a person would vote for the President or his party in the next election. So, if the subjects who were shown news dealing with environmental issues, and the President or his party were seen as weak on environmental issues, then they would be more likely to view the President in a poorer light. As a consequence these subjects would be less likely to vote for the President or his party if there was an election at the time of the priming.

But why does this happen? Well, when people make complex decisions, like evaluating the president, they don't scan through their memory for all of the information that they possess. Instead, people tend to rely on shortcuts to decisions known as heuristics. We use all sorts of heuristics in our daily lives, usually referring to them as "rules of thumb." In general these rules of thumb are beneficial. Imagine if you had to search through every memory that you posses each and every time you had to make a decision, you'd be paralyzed by indecisiveness. But while some heuristics are beneficial, some can cause errors of judgment and lead to other problems; these are known in psychology as cognitive biases. One prominent type of heuristic is the representative heuristic, which leads to, amongst other things, stereotyping of different social groups. Another prominent political heuristic, which is often a cognitive bias, is party identification, meaning that many people don't think about why they vote for a certain candidate. Instead, they just assume that the candidate from their preferred party supports their position on the issue or is the best person for the job. This would help to explain why a survey done before the last election found that many Republicans didn't know where President Bush stood on a number of key foreign policy issues.

The heuristic that is manipulated by the agenda-setting effect is one of the oldest known and well documented and is known as the availability heuristic. Psychologists have found that people base their decisions on what information comes to mind most easily, meaning that whatever affects the accessibility of your memories affects the decisions that you will make. Because the media has a profound effect on which information will come to mind with the greatest ease, it also has a large effect on how we make our political decisions.

But is the media the only thing that affects which memories are easiest to access? Let's take a look again at the chart of the reminiscence bump from last week.

(Source: Rybash, J.R. & Monaghan, B. E., Episodic and semantic contributions to older adults' autobiographical recall, The Journal of General Psychology; Jan 1999)

As you can see, for older people there are two areas of their memory which are most easily accessed, those that are most recent and those that are from the reminiscence bump period of life. So while the media certainly have significant effects on what memories are most easily accessed by older viewers, so do those memories from their reminiscence bump period. I would guess that the two may combine to have an even stronger effect.

This is why I thought that the 2004 election would revolve around Vietnam. First, we have a war in Iraq and as a result I thought that there would be large portions of the news devoted to the war in Iraq. This would bring the more general category of war into the minds of the American public, which would bring the Vietnam War to the fore of the minds of the "Vietnam Generation." (This is still speculation, since as I noted in my first essay I abandoned my proposed research in this area in favor of working with Music for America. However, I think that most of the reasoning here could be experimentally validated).

But while I figured that simply reporting on the Iraq War would bring Vietnam to the minds of the Vietnam Generation, I also thought that comparisons of the Iraq war with the Vietnam War would be made in the media, since the creators and editors of the media are primarily from that generation. This, I thought, would create an amplification effect, since news viewers would probably make their own internal comparisons, plus the media would make direct comparisons. And thus I thought that in the end, the election would be decided by the Vietnam War, more than by the Iraq War.

At first I thought that these memories would increase support for John Kerry, but when I started to research the opinions of Americans at the time I realized that this was probably not the case. I am going to have to save a deeper analysis of opinions of the Vietnam Generation towards that war for later. For now I will say that despite the fact that a majority of people believe that the Vietnam War was a mistake, they have differing reasons for believing so, and blame different groups or events for the war's failure. In my eyes the failure to understand and directly address the complex emotions and memories of the Vietnam Generation led to Kerry's losses amongst that age group, for example amongst the so-called "security moms."

Youth Voting

By now you might be wondering: "What does this have to do with Music for America ?" Actually it has a lot to do with MfA, and this research is what led me to believe that MfA was performing some of the most important functions during the last election.

Here's why:

First of all, you can see that the most important demographic for political groups and parties to communicate with are those in their critical period. This is because the memories and behaviors of this period of life affect the opinions and behaviors of people for the rest of their lives. Focusing on younger voters is therefore a double investment. Getting youth to support an issue, candidate, or party when they are young increases the possibility that that issue, candidate or party will win the day in a current election. But, it also helps to ensure that the person will support that issue, candidate, or party for the remainder of their life.
Because the reminiscence bump forms over a span of 10+ years, we can see that it is important to engage young people over a long period of time. Music for America seemed to have a model of sustainable engagement. First of all, by working together with bands and venues MfA held the potential to continue to communicate with young people even when an election wasn't approaching. Along with this, MfA volunteers got to see their favorite bands for free, and sometimes even got to meet their favorite musicians, which would hopefully help to keep them politically interested, if not active, after the election. Instead of focusing on political candidates or parties, MfA focused on issues, and as I liked to tell the kids at the shows, these issues aren't going to be solved in a single election, even if the better candidate wins.

Since the media have such profound affects upon the things that we see as important, it is imperative that those who want to build a future majority help to set the political agenda of young people, pushing the issues that effect our generation to the fore of their thoughts. It's important to note that our perceptions of each party have not been completely formed until we are 30, and so while the priming effect might be predictable once we reach an older age, when we are younger there is still the possibility that we can change how each party is seen in relation to each issue.

Music for America also seemed able to overcome some of the media obstacles standing in the way of communicating effectively with young people. First of all, MfA had access to large numbers of young people (in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands). If MfA could get their attention and motivate them to visit the website then there was the possibility of bypassing the extremely expensive broadcast channels of communication. In a future post, when I discuss persuasion, I'll come back to the topics of attention and motivation.

Because MfA was created and run by young people it held the possibility of speaking to other young people about politics in their language. This is extremely important since, to a large degree, those in the mainstream media talk to young people from the perspective of an older generation. As the collective memory studies showed (and as common sense dictates) people remember things in relation to their notion of self, and so it's imperative that communications aimed towards youth speak to them from their own perspective.

But possibly the largest obstacle created by the media that I felt Music for America could overcome was the unidirectional communication flow information of the broadcast and print media. On the one hand this meant giving visitors to Music for America's site the ability to self-select what information they wanted to see/read/hear/watch. However, I also felt that MfA's outreach efforts could enable progressives to collect data on the opinions of our generation. Since our youth dominates our memories when we are older it's imperative to understand the opinions of young people, and especially the movements of opinion through time.

And so with thoughts of setting the agenda for my generation, and hopes of figuring out what the rest of the kids out there were thinking, I came onto Music for America's forums. Soon, however, I would be convinced that I had misunderstood the power of the internet and the nature of what was going down with our generation.