Shift in political climate attracts young voters

'Voting appears to be habit forming'
Don Green, a professor of political science at Yale University, said 2004 voting statistics are an indication of what this year will look like.

“Voting appears to be habit forming,” he said. “People who vote in a given election are likely to vote in subsequent elections.”

Young voters are also coming out more because the politicians and political parties are paying more attention to them, Green said.

“2004 will be remembered as an election in which both parties emphasized voter mobilization strategies as opposed to voter persuasion strategies,” Green said. “These campaigns reached down to the bottom of the list and contacted young people that may have otherwise been ignored. The net effect was a surprisingly high turnout among young people.”

The younger crowd’s interest in politics extends to the polling process itself.

YouthNoise, a nonpartisan, nonprofit social networking site, will be posting cell-phone video interviews in which volunteers will ask voters if they felt the polling process was legitimate and what the most important issues in the election are, said Vijay Chattha, from Veeker, the company whose mobile phone video technology will be used.

Other youth political groups say they have embraced technology as a key outreach method.

Appealing to voters online
The National College Republican Committee has groups on popular social networking sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com. And Rock the Vote’s Reimer said his group has teamed up with Facebook.com in the same way it has collaborated with MTV in the past. The Rock the Vote-sponsored group on the Web site has over 15,000 members and is climbing at a rate of almost 1,000 members a day, he said.

Reimer said the surest way to get people to vote is to register them.

“2004 was our first year of really pushing online voter registration,” he said. “We registered 1.2 million people just through our Web site, and it totally blew us away. We think the majority of young people still don’t know if you want to register to vote, you don’t have to go to the post office.”

Based on his studies on voter behavior, Green explains the typically lower voter turnout among young people because of their lack of experience.

“They’ve participated less often in elections and they might be more apprehensive about how and when to vote. They also tend to be a very mobile population, and registration laws make it harder for them to vote,” he said.

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