The Youth Vote
Neither George Bush nor John Kerry should take their support for granted
By TIM DICKINSON, Rolling Stone Magazine, October 20, 2004

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Giddiness overtook Erik Smith as he shuttled his precious cargo across southwest Ohio on the night of October 3rd. The lanky Smith -- a junior at Miami University of Ohio -- cranked the ska-punk Hippos on the stereo of his maroon '91 Grand Prix. His heart pounding, Smith rolled up to his drop-off: the Board of Elections office in the town of Hamilton, where he handed over registration forms for sixty new voters, delivering them just minutes before the 9 p.m. deadline to qualify for the November election.
"It was just a charged feeling for me -- really intense," says Smith, his voice taut. "I helped sixty people register to vote, and I'm going to get those sixty people out to vote November 2nd and make their voices heard. That is probably one of the most exhilarating experiences that I've ever had."

In any other presidential election, one might have been forgiven for telling Smith to get a life. After all, there's some truth to the myth that "voting is for old people." Since the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen, participation in presidential elections among voters under the age of twenty-four has declined from fifty-two percent in 1972 to thirty-six percent in 2000. Turnout by older voters, meanwhile, runs nearly thirty points higher. "We're supposed to pay great homage to the youth vote," campaign strategist James Carville told ROLLING STONE in May. "But the youth vote is less important than the elderly vote -- because the old people actually vote."

Talk to anyone in the field, however, and they will tell you there's something different about 2004. Getting pumped about voting is no longer a mark of dweebdom on campus -- particularly for young people in presidential battleground states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida and Oregon. This year, the youth vote is not only being rocked -- it's being rapped, punked, mobbed and even smacked down. Generation Y voters have been the target of an unprecedented campaign by rockers (Bruce Springsteen with Vote for Change and Christina Aguilera with Declare Yourself), hip-hoppers (Russell Simmons and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network) and wrestlers (Hurricane of WWE's Smackdown Your Vote). Meanwhile, organizations from the Sierra Club to the League of Pissed Off Voters are working to register and mobilize the young -- and the effort appears to be paying off. For the first time since 1992, when Bill Clinton wielded his sax on Arsenio Hall, as many as half of all young voters are expected to turn out. Voters under thirty could cast at least 20 million ballots this year -- enough to make them kingmakers on November 2nd.

"All the signs are favorable," says Carroll Doherty, editor of Pew Research. "And those signs weren't there in 2000 at this stage."

Consider the numbers. Rock the Vote has registered more than 1.2 million young voters -- more than double the group's previous record -- and Declare Yourself has signed up 800,000. In a poll of ROLLING STONE readers, ten percent said they had registered to vote through those two groups. The Hip-Hop Summit, for its part, says it has registered 500,000 new voters. "I think a lot of the traditional pundits are going to be shocked with the increase in youth voting," predicts Benjamin Chavis, co-founder of the Hip-Hop Summit and former executive director of the NAACP.

And consider the cash: Voter-mobilization efforts are spending at least $50 million to get young voters to the polls next month. The New Voters Project, a nonpartisan organization with nearly $10 million in foundation grants, has registered 204,000 young voters in the crucial swing states of Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico and Iowa. In Wisconsin -- which was decided by fewer than 6,000 votes in 2000 -- the group has registered upward of 130,000 young voters. That's one of every five college-age voters in the state. In Ohio, Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself have registered 60,000 young people, and in the all-important Florida, they've put registration cards in the hands of 90,000 new voters.

"There's a huge incentive for candidates to capitalize on the large and fluid youth turnout," says Ivan Frishberg, communications director of the New Voters Project. "If they don't, someone will regret it as a missed opportunity."

John Kerry has made the most concerted push to reach young voters. He has strapped on his guitar at every opportunity, made a cameo on MTV's Choose or Lose and aired ads on Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. George Bush, by contrast, has been content to trot out his twins, Jenna and Barbara, on the campaign trail and focus on what campaign spokeswoman Sharon Castillo calls "the sports stuff" -- appearances at Nascar races and football games. But youth organizers say neither campaign has done enough to court first-time voters. "They have to spend their money," says Jehmu Greene, president of Rock the Vote. "They have to put themselves in front of this audience."

While voter-registration efforts are playing a critical role, experts say that good old-fashioned substance is what's luring young voters back to the polls. "Young people are engaged for the most traditional of reasons," says William Galston, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland. "The stakes are high and the contrasts are stark." In a recent poll conducted by CIRCLE -- considered the pre-eminent authority on young people and politics -- nearly sixty percent of voters under thirty believe the country is "seriously off-track." Eighty percent of those registered say they are "definitely" going to vote this year. While almost certainly exaggerated, that number is nearly twenty points higher than it was in 2000.

Iraq -- and the specter of a renewed draft -- also appears to be sparking youth-voter engagement. Despite frequent disavowals from the administration, fifty-one percent of young people believe that President Bush wants to reinstate the draft. "When you look at the last time that fifty percent of this age group turned out, it was around the Vietnam War," says Greene. "This generation is seeing more soldiers dying month after month. They're scared and they want answers. There's a sleeping giant in this election -- and it's about to wake up."

But talk like this prompts the question: Which candidate has the most to gain from Generation Y's voting power? Conventional wisdom says that young voters swing Democratic. That was certainly the case in the Clinton era -- most dramatically in 1996, when young voters gave the president a nineteen-point edge over future Viagra spokesman Bob Dole. But because they are new to the political process and have yet to develop firm party loyalty, young voters are a fickle demographic. Anytime you hear that young people don't make a difference, remember this: Had Al Gore preserved Clinton's edge among the young, he would be president today. Instead, Bush erased the youth gap in 2000, capturing half the young-adult vote.

Throughout much of the summer, polls showed John Kerry with as much as a twenty-point lead among young voters -- until the Swift Boaters and the GOP convention unleashed sharp attacks on the Democrat. Even after Kerry's dominating performance in the first presidential debate, a Pew Research poll showed the senator and the president deadlocked at thirty-nine percent among the under-thirty crowd -- with a whopping twenty-four percent declaring themselves still up for grabs. "If assessing the likely vote is going to be hard, assessing the likely vote of those under thirty is going to be ten times harder," admits Doherty of Pew Research. "We just don't know."

Galston of CIRCLE believes that Kerry is likely to get at least a "modest" boost out of a supercharged youth turnout. "But it's not a slam-dunk by any means," he cautions. "They'd better not take this group for granted."

Republicans are doing their part to make sure that Bush maintains the youth support he enjoyed in 2000. College Republicans have spun off from the national party as one of the independent groups known as 527s, enabling them to raise unlimited and unregulated donations. The strategy has been a runaway success: The College Republicans National Committee has raised more than $7.5 million -- half again the budget of Rock the Vote. Since 2000, the group has boosted membership by more than 100,000 and established more than 700 new campus chapters. It is also focusing on getting 60,000 young Republicans to cast absentee ballots -- a strategy to boost turnout, since those who cast a ballot by mail are more likely to actually vote than those who have to trek to a polling place.

"They're incredibly well-organized and professional," says Adam Alexander, national communications coordinator for the New Voters Project. "They have a really great operation going."

Not to be outdone, the young Democrats of America have also spun off into a 527. The group has a paltry budget of $1 million, but it coordinates the efforts of the Young Voter Alliance, a diverse coalition of MoveOn activists, gay Democrats and hip-hop youth. This alliance is, in turn, a member of America Votes -- the umbrella outfit that is coordinating the voter-mobilization efforts of more than a dozen progressive causes, from the AFL-CIO to Planned Parenthood. Other groups aggressively courting youth votes under the America Votes banner include 21st Century Democrats, which runs a peer-to-peer outreach arm called Vote Mob, and Music for America, which is mobilizing young voters where they rock: at concerts by artists such as Usher, Beastie Boys and Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra.

"It's really unprecedented," says Jane Fleming, executive director of the Young Democrats of America. "Typically, progressive groups and Democratic groups, while we're all friends, never really coordinated our activities. That meant lots of duplication, lots of money not spent in the right ways. The concept behind America Votes is that we can share polling numbers and coordinate what precincts we're going into, so that we're reaching as many people as possible." The Young Voter Alliance is working in Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Vote Mob is spending its $2 million to turn out the vote in Oregon, Minnesota and Nevada. Both groups are tag-teaming the vital state of Ohio.

To reach youth who don't normally come to campaign events or get-out-the-vote rallies, Michael Moore has launched the Slacker Uprising Tour: a push through sixty cities in twenty battleground states to bring nonvoters into the electoral fold. Those who register receive free beer, snack foods and clean underwear. "I am calling for a nonvoter uprising," Moore declared, "led by thousands of campus slackers who proudly sleep till noon and who believe that papers are for rolling, not reading."

Whether the target is stoned slackers or born-again Bushies, the key to getting out the youth vote is getting out among young voters. "It's critical to have face-to-face contact with them," says Kelly Young, director of 21st Century Democrats. A generation that grew up saturated by media tends to ignore get-out-the-vote pitches via TV and direct mail. "The more personal and authentic the communication, the more effective," says Donald Green, a political scientist at Yale University and co-author of Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout.

Organizers have also learned from the failure to turn out the youth vote in the past two elections. It's not enough to register new voters -- you have to get them to the polls. Rock the Vote plans to call every young person it has registered in key states and urge them to vote, and is making a late push in Wisconsin and Minnesota, where residents can register on Election Day. The New Voters Project also has a massive voter-turnout operation. "It'll be like Normandy," says Frishberg. "All told, there will be millions of phone calls. Hundreds of thousands of people getting visits at their doors. An incredible on-campus and neighbor-to-neighbor program to get all of these young people out to vote."

And that's precisely where the boyish enthusiasm of organizers like twenty-year-old Erik Smith could make the difference. "It's phenomenal to be here in southwest Ohio, because this is ground zero of the battleground for the election," says Smith, who is leading a get-out-the-vote team of six students for Vote Mob. "We're all in it for the same reason: to participate in democracy and get other people to participate in democracy." One new voter at a time.


Resources and Links

Youth Voting: Citizenship: A Challenge for All Generations