non-college youth

• Marc Ambinder notes that for the first time, MTV will accept paid political advertisements. Gawker has the appropriately snarky response.
• Kevin Bondelli notes that SMS is one of the best tools for organizing rural youth.
• McCain has a Facebook App! Called "Pork Invaders," the game lets you sling vetos at unnecessary spending projects symbolized by big flying pigs. I can already envision the Democratic response - a Facebook App that lets you play wack-a-mole with McCain's lobbyist buddies.
• Speaking of campaign-related video games, does anyone else remember the Bush Game from back in 2004? Good times.
• Because I'm a geek and I already miss Battlestar Galactica, I'll post this essay on Why I'd Vote for Baltar. It's the new "I voted for Kodos."
• Facebook has finally surpassed MySpace in unique viewers per month.
• Michael Hais and Morley Winograd note that political coalitions are changing, but the pundits can't shake their old models.
• Student PIRGs report that lower interest rates beginning in July on Stafford Loans will save students thousands of dollars.
• The Seattle Times wonders if Obama will be able to help down-ballot candidates.
• At WireTap, Kristina Rizga has a few ideas about closing the participation gap between college and non-college youth.
• For those who couldn't attend, this was one of the highpoints of the PDF conference - Tracy Russo (former Edwards blogger) smacking down McCain internet advisor Mark SooHoo about McCain's understanding of the potential of the internet to transform governance:

• Finally, I'm wondering what y'all think of this Blogging Heads video about the political implications of Hip Hop:

Updated to more specifically define "non-college" youth.

After a six-week lull, voting in the Democratic Primary picks up again tomorrow, this time in Pennsylvania, where the Obama campaign is looking for a win (or something close to a tie) in order to slam the door on the candidacy of Sen. Clinton, the success of which is looking more and more unlikely with each passing contest and Super Delegate endorsement.

As in all previous states, youth turnout tomorrow will surely rise well above levels from 2000 or 2004. With such high stakes on the line, it may even double or triple. I would love to be able to say that such increased turnout among young voters will be the key to an Obama win, but the deck seems stacked against such a possibility.

On paper, the math would seem to be good. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) (pdf), young voters (18 - 29) make up 21% of the eligible electorate in Pennsylvania, or just under 2 million voters. That's about average. Pennsylvania is a big college state, though, and 23% of those young voters are college students, a group which votes in high numbers for Sen. Obama. According to a CBS Newswire poll, PA students support Sen. Obama over Sen. Clinton 71 - 29%.

In the demographically similar state of Ohio, Obama lost to Clinton 54 - 44%. In that contest, young people made up 16% of the Democratic Electorate. Obama will need young voters to make up a much greater share of the electorate tomorrow if he is to overcome Clinton, who has typically held the lead in polling results.

But here's the rub. This campaign was supposed to be over on Super Tuesday. No one thought the two Democratic candidates would still be duking it out in March, let alone April. This has consequences.

As Ben Adler reported in the Politico, the Obama campaign didn't begin voter registration efforts on campuses until late February, and once they did, those efforts ran smack into one of the hazards of student organizing: spring break. During the final weeks of voter registration, most students were away on a beach or at home with their family. Mix in the fact that many students, thinking the contest would never get this far, decided to vote absentee in their home states, and you have a recipe for lower than average student turnout in a state with a higher than average student population.

There is one factor that could change this equation, and that is an increase in turnout from "non-college" youth, or young people with no college experience. As reported by CIRCLE earlier this year, non-college youth, despite comprising a slightly higher percentage of the eligible youth vote, are turning out in far lower numbers than their college-attending and college-educated peers. On Super Tuesday, non-college youth comprised a rather dismal 21% of all young voters (pdf). This, despite the fact that non-college youth make up slightly more than half of the youth population nationwide.

Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns recognize this, and are reaching out to non-college youth, but the work is much harder than engaging students. Non-college youth are not clumped together geographically around a campus, and are thus harder to target. Because many of these "other" young voters are working jobs, in the military, or struggling to start families, they also tend to have very different policy concerns than their college-educated peers, making it a challenge for the campaigns to speak to and engage them.

If Obama can narrow the gap slightly among other constituencies (like white working class men), then a big bump in turnout among these non-college youth could turn the youth vote into a decisive factor in tomorrow's election. This is a long shot, but not outside the realm of possibility as non-college youth have received special attention in Pennsylvania not only from the campaigns but from outside organizations as well.

In the last year - and in particular the last six weeks - Russell Simmon's nonprofit, the Hip Hop Summit Action Network - has been on the ground targeting under-served communities and communities of color, to educate, register, and get young people out to vote. Working in partnership with PowerPAC and the NAACP, the group claims to have registered 120,000 young Pennsylvanians since January.

Tomorrow will be the test of the effectiveness of those efforts. If non-college youth turnout in greater numbers than they have in previous contests, then Obama just might pull this off, or at least keep it close enough to deny Clinton the momentum she needs to continue. If not, we're headed to North Carolina, Indiana, and maybe all the way to the convention.

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.

A few quick hits this morning:

NPR takes a closer look at non-college young voters and posits that they are being "left behind" in the surge of participation we've seen this year. What was most interesting to me about this story was that they include college graduates/young professionals in the category of "non-college." I always assume that the term applies strictly to young people lacking a college degree and not currently attending university. It's weird because the graphic on the right seems to support my interpretation, but the article itself is quite unclear.

Peter Levine, the Director of CIRCLE, has an interesting post on his blog outlining the many levers of power in our democracy (non profits, voting, the arts, academia, etc.) and analyzing the pros and cons of using each to accomplish major change. I think he is slightly off when looking at the "cons" of blogging and the arts - there is ample evidence of blogs leading to offline action (see Donna Edwards' win just a few weeks ago), and the arts can be more influential than he thinks. But of course I'm biased. I wish the chart Levine constructed was an image - it would be a good thing to post around as a conversation starter, and it's certainly something all activists should at least look at and think about.

The Wall Street Journal gives props to young voters in a pretty good article in yesterday's paper.