Many a political campaign has been premised on the idea of motivating and turning out young voters; most have failed. If the young voter ruled American politics, George McGovern would have walloped Richard Nixon, and Howard Dean would be finishing up his first term.
Indeed, youth turnout rates in recent elections have been downright pathetic. In 1972, the first year 18-year-olds had the right to vote, nearly half of citizens aged 18-24 turned out to the ballot box. But by 1976, with the Vietnam War off the table, the turnout rate plummeted to 42%. It has since fallen as low as 32% in 2000 before rebounding slightly in 2004.
Barack Obama is hoping to do a lot better than that – and unlike so many of his predecessors, there are signs that he may actually succeed. In 2004, voters aged 29 or younger represented 9% of the Democratic primary electorate, according to statistics compiled from exit polls. In 2008, that fraction jumped to 14%, representing a 52% improvement as a share of the electorate. Those voters overwhelmingly favored Obama, preferring him to Hillary Clinton by a 60-37 margin.
What might a parallel surge in youth turnout do for Obama in November? My site, FiveThirtyEight.com, simulates the election 10,000 times each day based on the most recent polling and demographic trends. Our most current projection assigned Obama a 64% chance of winning the election, with an average count of 298 electoral votes. If, however, we assume that youth turnout increases by 52% in each state, as it did in the primaries, and assign two-thirds of those votes to Obama, Obama’s electoral vote projection jumps to 315, and he wins the election 72% of the time.
Entire states may change hands as a result of motivating the youth vote, particularly in the South (think Virginia, North Carolina and possibly Georgia) and the West (Colorado, Nevada, Montana), where young voters are abundant.
So what about the “how”? It takes more to motivate the youth vote than simply going on MTV and answering a question about boxers or briefs. And there are three basic components to a successful strategy:
Branding. One way to pierce young voters’ attention barrier is to market yourself like the products they love. And this is something the Obama campaign understands exceptionally well – the importance of OBAMA-. From the elegant serif font on their website to their use (and occasional overuse) of the campaign’s logo to their Madison Avenue-like slogans, the Obama campaign distances itself from the stodgy, haphazard presentation of a traditional political campaign. Obama is the Mac to John McCain‘s PC.
Issue Focus. Being cool needn’t mean dumbed down. Young voters are increasingly knowledgeable about politics – a Pew Research Center poll released in July found that voters aged 30 or younger were better informed than their older peers on issues like Iraq and abortion. To connect with the young voter means understanding those issues that are most important to them. One such issue is the environment. As the economy has grown worse, the environment has been subsumed into the issue of energy security (more narrowly, the issue of gas prices). But young voters care about the environment for the environment’s sake, and see it as their generational imperative to protect the planet. Obama needs to speak to the issue in these terms, talking about the kind of world he wants his two young daughters to grow up in. Another issue important to young voters, though it requires somewhat more political courage, is civil rights for gays and lesbians, support for which is very strongly correlated with age. Highlighting his support for issues like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation, could win Obama support among young voters.
Face Time. Ultimately, however, the trickiest issue in motivating the youth vote may be that young voters have too many things they want to do, and not enough time to do it. They are not as likely as older voters to be engaged in the campaign through traditional means like reading newspapers or watching cable news. As such, the campaign needs to get in front of them – in both real and virtual ways. The “real” part might involve organizing a tour of Midwestern colleges shortly after the Democratic Convention in late August or early September, at which Obama can kick off massive voter registration drives. The virtual part occurs mostly via the Internet, an area in which the Obama campaign already excels. He could further his efforts by hosting periodic online chat sessions at BarackObama.com, or by agreeing to participate in the YouTube New Orleans Town Hall forum on Sept. 18, which neither Obama nor McCain have yet committed to.
Is all of this going to work? The truth is that we probably know until Election Day, once all the voting is done. Young voters are notoriously difficult to capture in horse race polls. For one thing, pollsters often rely on models of “likely voters,” which are contingent on such factors as past voting behavior. Young voters, because they lack rich voting histories, are often excluded by such screening measures. In a typical election, when the youth vote is split more evenly, that has not been such a problem, but in this one it might be.
Confounding the problem is that young voters rely heavily – often exclusively – on mobile phones, which most pollsters will not call. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control, 31% of adults aged 18-24 rely exclusively on cell phones, and another 18% rely principally upon them. That means that nearly half of young voters simply can’t be reached in most surveys, and while pollsters have attempted to develop workarounds to these problems, they may not be entirely adequate. Recent work by Gallup and the Pew Research Center showed Obama’s margin improving by 2-3 points when a supplementary cell phone sample was included.
Barack Obama has an advantage that Howard Dean and George McGovern didn’t have – the partisan ecology is so favorable to the Democrats that he can win the election even without turning out young voters. But they are his ace in the hole. If he can get them to turn out in something resembling the proportion that older voters do, his election becomes a near certainty.
Nate Silver is managing partner of Baseball Prospectus and runs the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com