polling

I've long worried that John McCain could be, as Arianna Huffington put it yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, a "Trojan Horse" candidate for the GOP. His perceived status as a maverick and his cultural savvy has long inoculated him from the troubles plaguing the Republican Party and boosted his image among young voters. Out of all the GOP contenders, he seemed most capable of reviving the Republican brand among a generation trending heavily Democratic.

According to a new poll by Democracy Corps, that image of McCain the Maverick has shattered.

Since Democracy Corps' last survey in April, John McCain's favorable ratings among young voters has dropped from 34 to 30%, and his unfavorable ratings have jumped over ten points, rising from 37 to 49%. Two of the supposedly biggest advantages a McCain candidacy brings to the GOP - his popularity with independents and his "liberal" views on immigration reform - also took serious hits in recent months. Among independent young voters, McCain's unfavorable rating nearly doubled, rising from 27% in April to 49% in June, and among Hispanics his unfavorable rating is now a whopping 70%. Apparently McCain's "principled" stand on immigration during the primaries was not enough to pull Hispanics back towards the Republican Party.

According to the report, McCain's favorable/unforable numbers now mirror those of the Republican Party, which has seen it's brand collapse among young voters in the past two years:

In a head to head match-up against Barack Obama, McCain loses the youth vote 66 - 33% among likely voters, a larger margin than Democrats enjoyed during the wave election of 2006.

What happened to McCain the Maverick? How did his highly-cultivated independent brand crash so fast?

Democracy Corps points to the transformation of McCain into "McSame," a typical politician tied to the failures of the Bush Presidency and the Republican Party. That notion has gained great traction in recent months, in particular around the issues of Iraq and the economy, the two most pressing issues in the eyes of young voters and two areas in which McCain is most tightly tied to the policies of the Bush Administration and the GOP.

According to Democracy Corps, when McCain's policies on Iraq and the economy are laid before young voters, along with potential consequences for young Americans, a majority of young voters (~60 - 65%) express serious to very serious doubts about McCain's candidacy. As long as McCain holds policy positions simlar to Bush and the GOP on those two major policy issues, and as long as Democrats, bloggers, and activists continue to explain the consequences of those policies to young voters, it's hard to see how McCain can recover his maverick status and gain ground among young voters.

Democracy Corps has released the latest edition in their "Youth for the Win" young voter polls: The Rising Wave Among Young People. The poll tracks youth involvement and measures youth support for the two candidates. Most of the information deals with McCain and the continued collapse of the Republican brand among young people. I'll have a separate post on that later today. Right now I want to focus on Democracy Corps' findings re: Senator Obama.

Democracy Corps notes that Senator Obama is expanding his lead over McCain among young voters and even exceeding the levels of youth support Democrats enjoyed during the 2006 wave elections. Significantly, he is also quickly consolidating the Democratic base and pulling in most of Clinton's core youth support:

Barack Obama now holds a 60 to 33 percent lead over John McCain with young people in this country. Among young voters most likely to vote, this lead jumps to 66 – 33 percent. Historically, these margins exceed Kerry’s showing in 2004 (54 – 45 percent) and echo the young people’s revolt against the Republican Congress in 2006 (60 – 38 percent). In claiming the nomination, Obama managed to consolidate Democrats and improve his showing among voting blocs that, at the national level, often preferred Hillary Clinton.

In an incredibly short amount of time, Obama has made double digit gains among unmarried women and Hispanics, and his favorability ratings have seen similar jumps. Democracy Corps notes that he still has ground to gain among young, married white women and "older" (24 - 29) white women, but beyond that he is quickly approaching the ceiling in terms of consolidating Democratic youth support. After that, any gains among young voters will be made among independents or Republicans dissatisfied with McCain (a growing group, as we'll see later).

So much for the divided Democratic Party.

Most of you have probably already heard that the latest Public Policy Polling survey has Barack Obama with a double digit lead over McCain - 50 - 39%. The Party is unifying behind Obama, allowing him to overtake McCain in states where he previously trailed.

So how are youth factoring into that equation? I took a look at what crosstab data is available (pdf), and, according to PPP, it doesn't look like Ohio youth are giving Obama much help at all.

You may remember that in the Ohio Primary, Sen. Obama crushed Senator Clinton among Ohio youth - 61 - 35%. Considering that young voters in Ohio participated in the Democratic primary over the GOP primary at a rate of almost 3 - 1 (pdf), it would be expected that Obama would blow-out McCain among Ohio youth.

My only explanation is sample size. Young voters were 17% of the sample (n=773), or about 131 respondents. The margin of error for the youth numbers could be huge.

The flip side of this equation is that if the PPP survey royally screwed up it's youth sample, that would mean that Obama might hold an even greater lead in Ohio than the survey indicates . . . anyone more savvy with numbers than me have thoughts on this?

This is something to watch - and another reason why we need more reliable youth polling. A lot of youth organizations will be on the ground in Ohio. For a variety of reasons (cell phone/lack of landlines, small sample sizes, etc.) most polls fail to adequately survey younger voters. It would be nice to have solid data about what youth are thinking and how we can best talk to them about the election. Particularly in the major battleground states.

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.

Gallup has a new poll up looking at various demographic dynamics in the Obama-McCain general election matchup. Here's what they're showing for the different age demographics/generations:

There are two interesting things to note here:

1. As DemFromCT notes, Gen X appears to be losing it's conservative voting habits and turning to the left. This supports similar data reported by PEW earlier this year, and is super bad news for Republicans. Gen X - particularly the older members - have long been one of their most reliable voting demographics. In 2004, Bush won 30 - 44 year olds (Gen X and younger Boomers) 53 - 46%.
2. Obama's advantage among Millennials echoes what we saw in 2006 when young voters chose Democrats 60 - 38%. In 2004, Kerry won young voters by a much slimmer 54 - 45%, and young voters were 17% of the electorate.

If Gen X votes Democratic, or splits it's vote in November, and if young voters make up 19 or 20% of the electorate and vote for Obama by a 23 point margin, this is going to be a blowout up and down the ballot.

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.

Just before the Obama campaign announced their intention to defund the left, Democracy Corps issues the second part of their new youth polling series: Youth for the Win! The report examines the youth electorate, identifies the opportunities and challenges facing Democrats in "maximizing the youth vote" in 2008, and calls on Democrats to do everything in our power to not let this demographic advantage go to waste.

There are four main takeaways from the poll:

1. Democrats maintain large and growing leads among young voters at the polls
2. Obama has the most support among all remaining candidates (even McCain), and he actually polls almost as well as the "Generic" Democrat numbers.
3. Winning over Clinton supporters will be a challenge for Obama
4. McCain has lower youth support, but is not yet identified with the Republican brand among young voters.

Affirming the obvious, the report shows rising youth support at the polls for Democrats, with most support this cycle going towards Senator Obama:

Obama will face two challenges in maximizing youth turnout this year. The first will be within his own party. Clinton supporters are far more likely to declare that they will not vote in November if Sen. Clinton is not the nominee:

Now, Obama has won the youth vote in most states by a landslide, but in a year of record youth turnout, Clintons numbers are still very very respectable. That's a lot of lost votes and that means Obama will have much shorter coattail for down-ballot candidates to ride. Bridges will need to be built/mended among Clinton's youth supporters in the coming months OR their activism will need to be channeled into forms of engagement aside from the Obama campaign (e.g. youth groups working at the state and local level).

The second challenge Obama faces in maximizing the youth vote for Democratic advantage in November comes from McCain. Polling shows that among young voters, McCain is not yet associated with the tarnished Republican brand. He's not popular by any means, but he should be far more unpopular considering his support for Republican policies.

With some serious help from the media, McCain has an image that distances him from traditional Republicans, and -- I've said it before, but I'll say it again -- he's skilled at playing the culture card to increase that "independent" image. He had a great turn on the Daily Show just last week in which Stewart let him slide on every major issue, and he'll be hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend. Now, that might seem like so much pandering to young people, but it's the type of pandering that most high-level Republicans are loathe to do.

The Obama campaign is going to need to tie McCain tightly to the Republican brand among young voters. Knowing their preference to "not go negative," I'm a little afraid that they won't be up to this task. Yet another reason why outside organizations can be a useful piece of progressive infrastructure.

Been traveling a lot this week and my browser has a gagillion open tabs of stuff I meant to blog. Here they are. I'll try to have a recap of the Demos Better Deal Conference posted later.

• Paul Rosenberg has a detailed post documenting all the ways in which McCain has failed to support the troops. - Open Left
• The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees with Webb - McCain is full of it in his opposition to the GI Bill. And they have the stats to prove it. - Think Progress
• Micah Sifry has an interesting post on "Voter File 2.0" and Catalist's plans for the future. - Tech President
• The blogosphere is starting to wonder why YDA and CDA Super delegates have yet to endorse Senator Obama. - Americablog
• Rock the Vote has calculated that Young Voter turnout this year increased by 2.2 million over turnout in the 2000 and 2004 primaries. - Rock the Vote
• More reportage on Obama's success in raising small dollar donations, particularly from young people. - The Politico
• Congress is fast-tracking a student loan bill, though whether that is a good or bad thing for students in the long-term is still unclear to me. - The Politico
• The Millennial Makeover authors argue that Clinton and Obama supporters arguing over the strength of their coalitions just don't get it; demography is destiny for the Democratic Party. - Huffington Post
• Where is the next generation of philanthropists? - Tactical Philanthropy
• More kvetching about the lack of protest music. Will they never stop whining about this? - Huffington Post
• Clay Shirky discusses our "cognitive surplus" and what it means for human information production and organizing. - Open Left
• Andrew Kohut explores the widening generation gap in how voters cast their ballots. - New York Times

Democracy Corp has issued a new poll of young voters: Youth for the Win (pd). The polls, conducted over landline, cellphone, and via the internet, treads a lot of old ground and I won't rehash it all here, but I do want to pull out a few interesting bits that put hard numbers to current memes about youth engagement and mark out distinctions that have thus far been overlooked.

First, some new stats on increased participation:

In early 2008 Democratic primaries, young people increased their participation by an astonishing 88 percent. Republican involvement also improved, though far less dramatically (by 7 percent).

This is great news for the Democrats. As the following graph illustrates, this lopsided increase in participation translates into a huge partisan advantage at the ballot box. The Democrats now have an advantage among young voters not seen in years, and potentially not since 1992:

The poll provides some interesting context as to what criteria these new voters are using to determine how to cast their ballots. To a much greater degree than among Obama supporters, it appears that Clinton supporters are engaging in identity politics. That makes sense. These are Millennials, and they are supposed to be a generation that rejects the identity politics and culture war frames of the past. Add on to that the fact that Sen. Obama is making a specific appeal to leave behind identity politics and it stands to reason that his supporters would not describe their support or engagement in those terms.

Even so, I'm a little surprised to see the numbers so high on the part of Sen. Clinton's supporters. Perhaps Clinton's supporters are those few of the younger generation who side with older feminists on the issue of the need to elect a woman President? If so, this seems to turn on its head the meme that Obama voters are casting their ballots based on the person(ality), not the issues. To the contrary, it would appear as if it is Clinton voters who are most likely to fit that description.

It's worth noting that this is the second poll to suggest that the cult of personality meme dogging Obama supporters is off-base. A Rock the Vote showed similar findings disputing that claim back in February.

I've said this before, but in light of yesterday's post about Facebook "Jumping the Shark," I thought it worth saying yet again - social networks are not the killer app for reaching young people, and the Democracy Corps poll underscores this. Yes, social networks can enable young people to do amazing things and compete in the political marketplace against much bigger players, but they are not a mass-marketing tool for for campaigns to reach young people.

When it comes to reaching young people online, it's important to remember that "internet" does not = "social networks." The internet is a pretty big place, and major content providers like Google News, CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream news sites get a lot of traffic from young people. Attaining earned media coverage on those sites - and making sure that coverage is at times youth-oriented - can go a long way in spreading a campaign message among Millennials.

Where social networks come into play is in organizing die-hard supporters and leveraging the most gain out of their involvement (see: 2006 immigrant rallies; Students for Barack Obama). As Colin Delaney of ePolitics notes, this is not a mass media strategy. It is a much more time and resource intensive peer-to-peer strategy. It is just as important, and at times intensely more powerful than a mass-media strategy, but it is a distinct tool in the organizers toolbox and should be regarded as such.

Finally, the poll makes clear that while the Internet is a very important tool and public information space, it is still just one of a few places where campaigns can reach a mass-market youth audience. It is not the only one by any means. Local and national television still play a significant role in informing and influencing young people, which means that campaigns need to talk about youth issues and to young people at their events on the stump. That kind of earned media gets carried on broadcast and cable networks where it is watched by a significant number young people who will then talk to their friends.

The PEW study I posted about yesterday is getting a lot of play. Kevin Drum blogged it, as did The Carpetbagger Report, and Marc Ambinder, all favorably.

Not all the coverage was favorable, however, and I want to point you to the excellent response by Kevin Bondelli to those who doubt the findings.

Here are the fallacies that these critics of the youth vote seem overly fond of:

1. Young people don’t vote, so it doesn’t matter if they identify as Democrats. Even if we accepted the untrue statement that young people don’t vote, they do eventually grow up, this isn’t Peter Pan. Since research in fact has shown that party identification for the most part stays consistent throughout life, it still should be troubling to conservatives.
2. The silly kids are Democrats now that they are young and don’t know any better, but they’ll grow out of it. Research says otherwise my conservative friends.
3. Not enough young people will vote to affect the 2008 election, since Gore and Kerry didn’t win with the youth vote. Have you not heard of a trend line? Surber actually shows the youth vote increasing from 2000 to 2004, he should know better. With elections as close as they are, as well as the examples of Democratic candidates in 2006 that did win because of the youth vote, I don’t know how they can ignore it.

Definitely worth a read today.