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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Glitzy voter-registration drives are wooing apathetic young voters with celebrities and flashy Web sites. But 18- to 24-year-olds may be too jaded and media-saturated to respond to anything except appeals from other young people -- real, live ones.
Apr 23, 2004 | Outside Manhattan's Irving Plaza rock club on a recent spring evening, a young, excited crowd wrapped around the block, waiting to get into a sold-out show by emo poster boys Ben Kweller and Death Cab for Cutie. Megan Brown, 18, made her way down the line, asking "Are you registered?" and carrying a clipboard full of voter registration forms with a "Rock the Vote" sticker on the back. Petite, with a thick, curly ponytail, Brown rocks the vote at "street team" events like these at least twice a month.
"This is the first activity I haven't put on college applications," says the high school senior. "I'm concerned about what's happening to the country. I really feel like it's something I'm doing for me." Rock the Vote loves volunteers like Brown: Not only is she a young hipster in an Urban Outfitters T-shirt, she's cheerful, approachable and undaunted by giggly rejections ("I'm only 12!" one Death Cab fan protests). She only registers four or five of the 200-odd people on the sidewalk, including a 39-year-old ticket scalper, but the personal contact, she says, makes her feel like she's making a difference.
Over the past 13 years, the independent nonprofit Rock the Vote, with MTV (and its corporate parent, Viacom) as a prominent sponsor, has laid down the blueprint for today's high-profile register-to-vote crusades: a flashy Web presence, TV and print public service announcements, and celebrity-studded live events. But do media-focused campaigns like these work -- or is the strategy about as effective as glitter lipstick on a donkey? New independent research from CIRCLE, the foremost not-for-profit youth-and-politics think tank, turns that strategy on its head. According to CIRCLE's research, a personal approach, like Megan Brown's, garners more results from postmillennial marketing-inured kids than a celebrity come-on.
Wooing the much coveted 18-to 24-year-old demographic is always a priority for candidates (and an incredibly daunting task: youth turnout in national elections has declined by 13 percent since 1972, the first year 18-year-olds could vote), but this year it's more important than ever. There's the sheer size of Gen Y, for one: There are 24 million citizens between 18 and 24, slightly more than in 2000. And they're seemingly up for grabs: a whopping 41 percent identify as independent, while the rest skew more Democrat than Republican -- but the difference is slight. Perhaps as a result of the 2000 election, when it became apparent that a handful of votes does, actually, mean something, the demo seems more likely to vote this year. A survey this fall by Harvard University's Institute of Politics found 75 percent of college students were registered to vote and 82 percent of those said they planned to vote this year, compared with 75 percent in 2000.
And for the first time in 2004, groups aimed at very different sections of the 18-to-30 demographic are uniting in one massive crusade against the scourge of political apathy. MTV's series of newsy, political specials, called Choose or Lose, WWE's self-dubbed "pro-social public relations campaign" Smackdown Your Vote!, independent nonprofit Rock the Vote, hip-hop culture impresario Russell Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, and sitcom mogul Norman Lear's Declare Yourself youth voting campaign all announced in February that they will join in the 20 Million Loud Campaign for 2004 -- an umbrella campaign for these voter-registration drives that also includes nonprofits like the League of Women Voters and the Youth Vote Coalition. MTV news specials, concerts and events, contests and giveaways will all appear under the 20 Million Loud rubric, and the campaign will cross-promote with events like the Wrestlemania tour and a new reality show on Showtime (also owned by MTV parent Viacom) called "American Candidate" in which contestants will compete to win support for a real run for office. Twenty Million Loud's participating organizations will share Rock the Vote's online voter registration tool, and one goal: to increase youth voter turnout by 2 million votes over the 2000 election, to 20 million, the number that voted in 1992.
