Getting Out the Youth Vote

Following are some of the efforts to increase youth voting and candidates’ attention to young voters over the past several years, and their results:

Candidate attention: The Aspen Institute’s Young Voter Initiative, funded in part with $625,000 from Pew, included creation of a “tool kit” in 2000 to help candidates reach young voters. The kit included ideas about crafting literature and Web pages that stress the candidate’s activities and positions on issues of concern to youth. Organizers did not measure how many candidates used the ideas to reach young people.

This year the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, at the Council for Excellence in Government, took the idea further with its Campaign for Young Voters. It focused on helping candidates in five sites – Des Moines, Iowa; El Paso, Texas; Little Rock, Ark.; Fresno, Calif.; and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pa. In the first three, the project asked candidates to sign “pledge cards” saying they would devote resources to targeting young voters in exchange for getting advice on how to carry out the recommendations in the revamped tool kit.

The kit includes several downloadable documents, such as an 18th birthday card for candidates to mail to youth reminding them to register to vote, and a template for a candidate profile focusing on the candidate’s youth-oriented involvement and policy positions.

The project plans focus groups of young people to try to quantify how much attention candidates paid to young people and their issues in the targeted cities.

Events: When Youth Vote 2000 talked to youth about rallies, concerts and celebrity-filled events, says Communication Director Veronica De La Garza, “The youth were telling us, ‘Yeah, artists are fun, we like watching them, but we don’t take them seriously. They’re being paid to do this.’ ” But the events are worth doing occasionally, she says, because “you get a lot of exposure and keep the energy alive.”

Media Coverage: Various efforts to increase coverage of young voters – by MTV and Rock the Vote, for instance – appear to have had some effect on the mainstream news media. Studies by the Pew Charitable Trusts showed that there was more news media election-related coverage of young people in 2000 than in previous years, says Public Policy Director Michael Delli Carpini.

But while many of the stories talked about the concerns of young people, he says, “a lot the articles were about low voter turnout among young people.” As for “whether that [increased coverage] generates a greater sense of involvement” among young people, he says, “we can’t make that connection.”

The Medill News Service in Washington, D.C. (part of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism) produced more than 500 stories during the 2000 election for its subscribers – college newspapers and TV stations, and about 100 non-college daily newspapers. Funded in part with a $649,000 two-year grant from Pew, the project did not attempt to measure how many of the stories actually ran in the various news outlets.

“The point,” says Ellen Shearer, the news service director, “was to create a model of how to write for young people, to show that there are issues you can cover in politics that young people care about.” Focus groups showed that young people “like straight talk; they like to be shown directly what the impact [of an issue] is on them; they like to see young people quoted in stories.”
Left unanswered is whether the mainstream news media will pick up on that model. “I think there’s a lot of lip service paid toward reaching young audiences,” Shearer says.

Mock Elections: Kids Voting USA (www.kidsvotingusa.org) is a civic engagement program that, among other things, enables youths under 18 to cast nonbinding ballots on Election Day. The nonprofit reports that more than 750,000 kids voted this year. It cites studies saying that its program increases voting by the parents of the participating children, but it is unclear if those children are more likely to vote when they turn 18.

Pledges: In 1996, Rock the Vote got about 80,000 young people to sign cards pledging to vote, then mailed the cards to them shortly before the election. An evaluation by the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota found that in a sample of 800 of those card-signers, 67 percent voted.

Registration: Voter registration is a necessary element of get-out-the-vote drives – after all, you can’t vote if you’re not registered – but voting advocates see more and more evidence of how limited this strategy is. Some polls showed that only about half the registered young adults planned on voting this year. “There’s got to be a direct appeal to young people to vote once they’ve registered,” says Delli Carpini.

Rock the Vote says it has registered more than 500,000 young people (ages 18 to 30) since 2000.

Youth Conventions: Youth In Action, which conducts a variety of civic engagement activities, held youth conventions near the 2000 Republican and Democratic national conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Funded primarily by Pew ($325,000), the conventions brought together hundreds of youth delegates, who created a national “youth platform” to be distributed to the candidates. But George Bush and Al Gore turned down invitations to speak. (Ralph Nader spoke at the Philadelphia gathering.)
Pew hoped there would be “more of an exchange between these official party conventions and the youth conventions,” Delli Carpini says. “That just never happened.” And the youth platform “didn’t catch fire.”

Goutam Jois, the organization’s political outreach coordinator, says the conventions and platform succeeded in engaging youth and in helping to raise media awareness about young voter issues. But “it’s not going to have much impact on the political process,” he says, at least not immediately.