The Race for the Youth Vote
by Kevin Joy
WASHINGTON – Inside a fashionable nightclub one Monday night in October, Christian Price sipped Cristal champagne and mingled among 4,500 couture-clad twentysomethings packing the smoky, four-story dance hall on Washington’s Northeast side. But she wasn’t there to party, even though the open bar and thumping hip-hop music suggested otherwise.
This wasn’t just a casual evening out. Attendees paid $50 each to see former President Bill Clinton, the headliner at a bash intended to raise money for the Democratic National Committee and, perhaps more important, raise political participation among young people.
Around 11:30, over the booming strains of 50 Cent’s ubiquitous rap jingle “In Da Club,” Clinton took the stage to deafening applause and chants of “Bill! Bill! Bill!”
He spoke for only five minutes, but that didn’t matter. The event raised $250,000-90 percent of it from first-time political donors.
“Every time I see him I get star-struck,” Price, 21, a Capitol Hill intern, said of Clinton. “If the DNC did more events like this, they’d make a ton of money and reach more people.”
Reaching young people and spurring them to vote is a constant and growing challenge for politicians and political parties. The nine Democrats vying for their party’s presidential nomination are trying to break out of the pack in part by finding unique ways to connect to a generation distrustful of politics and reared on scandal.
With such demographer-coined titles as Generation Y, the New Millenials and the Nintendo Generation, young people today grew up on tabloid journalism, cable TV and, most recently, the Internet. They were bombarded with images of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky. They are media savvy and often skeptical. They watch reality television.
The trouble is, they avoid Election Day more than any other age group.
“The emerging voter right now already grew up in a world established by Watergate,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for Popular Television at Syracuse University. “In an age of fragmented popular culture, you’ve got a cynical, wise-guy population of young people.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds dipped from 50 percent in 1972-the first time 18-year-olds could vote in a presidential race-to 32 percent in 1996 and again in 2000.
That’s 8.6 million young people who voted in the last presidential election. By contrast, more than 40 million people cast votes for their favorites in the last two seasons of “American Idol,” a televised pop-star competition.
Steve Christoforou, 21, a senior in history at Yale and president of the university’s debate society, said he thinks college students have difficulty seeing past the “campus lens” and into the distant future when deciding whether to vote.
“We’re still young, and the consequences aren’t as visible,” he said. Candidates’ positions on Medicare, Social Security or tax reform won’t usually inspire 18-year-olds to vote, though they will bring out senior citizens-already the most dominant group at the polls, Christoforou said. “Candidates are not as deeply relevant in the same way to some young people like they might be for older generations.
” Many political experts view young people as politically unattainable. Former Clinton political adviser Paul Begala, now co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” deemed them “hopelessly ill-informed.”
Nevertheless, voting advocacy groups, political strategists and an odd smattering of celebrities have renewed efforts this year to attract a generation they see as an untapped resource, one that could produce crucial swing votes in a tight election.
Campaigns to entice young voters to the polls have been diverse, even a bit unorthodox. They include the non-partisan Smack Down Your Vote, supported by World Wrestling Entertainment and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (and more recently, the League of Women Voters), which registers voters at rallies featuring popular rappers, wrestling stars and religious leaders.
Two nonpartisan groups, Newspapers in Education and the National Association of Secretaries of State, have endorsed the short, snarky film “Let’s Go Voting,” starring actors Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughan, which tells high schoolers that voting is, like, really cool. The hyperactive 20-minute movie is the product of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the controversial animated series “South Park.”
The $4 million New Voters Project is a nationwide drive to register 260,000 young people in the next year and to increase voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds by 5 percent in 2004.
Declare Yourself, a $9 million voting drive founded by 81-year-old television producer and Connecticut native Norman Lear, includes an 18-college tour featuring an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. The only New England stop is Keene State College in New Hampshire on Jan. 26, the day before that state’s primary.
Smack Down Your Vote and Declare Yourself aspire to get a total of 2 million more young adults to vote in the 2004 election. But will the endorsement of rap artist LL Cool J or the Spandex-wearing, body-slamming Superstar Maven of World Wrestling Entertainment attract new voters?
Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, said glitzy, celebrity-driven campaigns are not often effective, since they rarely address anything other than the action of voting itself.
“Youths don’t vote because a wrestler or rock star asked them to,” Gans said. “They do vote because of idealism, a sense of greater national issues, something larger than themselves-really getting engaged through grassroots politics.”
A study released in October by the Harvard University Institute of Politics, which surveyed 18- to 24-year-olds on campuses across the nation, showed political interest is on the upswing. Of the 1,202 students who responded, 86 percent said they would “probably” or “definitely” vote in 2004. That would be a 169 percent increase from four years ago and, experts say, unlikely to occur.
On the other hand, a Harvard poll conducted in April 2000 found that 51 percent of students who participated believed political involvement rarely produced tangible results. A University of California-Los Angeles survey last fall found that less than one-third of incoming college freshmen view following politics as “important.”
“I don’t know what kind of sampling they’re taking,” said Derek Garcia, 22, a senior at Wesleyan University. “Most of that criticism has been generated mostly to cast American students as being apathetic to political issues. Colleges are centers of social issues and open-mindedness.”
Wesleyan, however, was rated the nation’s most politically active campus by Mother Jones magazine. More than 750 of the school’s 2,700 undergraduates traveled to New York last February to try to prevent the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Campus sidewalks are constantly etched in activist rhetoric with colored chalk. The college is, as 21-year-old Wesleyan junior Arusha Gordon called it, “kind of a bubble.”
But student sentiment is different on other campuses.
“This is a very apathetic campus, not very well-versed in politics at all,” said John Jevitts, 20, a junior at the University of Connecticut. “In no way could most people here name all nine [Democratic presidential] candidates.”
Since only about one-quarter of recent high-school graduates are enrolled in college, reaching the other 75 percent is difficult, said Dorothy James, a government professor at Connecticut College.
“You have a body of people who aren’t particularly interested in politics to begin with,” James said. “For these campaigns to make some real difference, they have to deal with the root cause of this problem. I’m not sure doing jazzy things is going to make a big difference.”
One of the most widely publicized efforts, last month’s Rock the Vote town-hall style debate-broadcast live on CNN from Boston’s Fanueil Hall-allowed viewers to question Democratic presidential candidates using e-mails, wireless text messaging and telephones. Technologically speaking, it was hip.
The questions ranged from marijuana use to racism to whether the candidates used Mac or PC computers (a play on the “boxers or briefs” inquiry Clinton fielded in a 1992 Rock the Vote event). The candidates tried to exude coolness-with only some degree of success.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and retired Gen. Wesley Clark, each wearing all-black ensembles with turtlenecks, looked slightly uncomfortable in their urbane threads.
It’s not window dressing-or issues, for that matter-but personal character that impresses young voters the most, said Ryan Jones, a UConn senior.
“What a lot of young people are looking for is strong leadership and personal dynamic,” said Jones, 21. “They’re more inclined to vote on the candidate, not just a specific issue.”
Politicians must tread carefully when courting young voters, according to Jonathan Zaff, president of 18to35, which works to involve young people in policymaking.
“This is an extremely savvy generation, and they’re not a group that likes to be marketed to,” Zaff said. “But the presidential candidates aren’t mind readers either. It’s important that young adults get involved and make sure their voices are heard.”
One popular method of small-scale mobilization has been through local gatherings called “meetups”-community get-togethers staged in coffeehouses, bars and homes to garner support for a candidate. On meetup.com, the Web site that organizes the events, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s campaign boasts 151,200 registered members. No other candidate has even one-third that number.
U.S. Representative Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, recently announced the formation of a bipartisan Congressional Youth Civic Caucus to look at issues affecting young people and urge politicians to initiate more voter outreach programs.
The Bush-Cheney campaign is starting its youth outreach eight months earlier than in the last election, according to spokesman Kevin Madden. It’s building a national student support group and organizing student committees. The campaign also is trying to reach out to a certain type of younger voter in another way: it has created a new fundraiser category called “Mavericks” for donors under 40 who raise $50,000 each.
With the help of Internet campaigning-encompassing e-mail “listservs” to send event updates, “blogs” that track day-to-day happenings and user-friendly Web sites-tech-savvy youth can feel more closely connected with a candidate, said Kerry Szeps, co-president the of the Connecticut Young Democrats. She credits Dean for fueling the Web-based phenomenon, which has garnered attention and copycat efforts from nearly every candidate.
While the Democratic presidential nominees are making every attempt to appeal to youth-the Rev. Al Sharpton recently hosted “Saturday Night Live” and Clark talks of his penchant for rap duo Outkast (“I can shake it like a Polaroid picture,” he said after a debate, using an obscure reference to one of the group’s hit songs)-they will have a tough time matching the electric connection Clinton made with young people in 1992.
Syracuse’s Thompson said he doubts any of the candidates will have an “Arsenio” moment, referencing Clinton’s wildly popular appearance on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” complete with sunglasses and a saxophone performance.
However, Dean did play Bob Dylan songs on the guitar and harmonica in Iowa last August.
But such attempts also carry risks.
“There’s always the uncomfortable moment when political candidates are in certain venues trying to ‘get down’ with the young folks-not only can that feel forced, but sometimes a little bit pathetic,” Thompson said. “They’ve got to speak with a candor and frankness that acknowledges this generation’s cynicism and skepticism, not to mention the very reason they’re appearing in this venue is to get their vote.”
