New Media Technology Crucial in Getting Out the Young Vote
TECHNOLOGY
The Keene Sentinel
Joe Vines
Boston University Washington News Service
September 23, 2008
WASHINGTON – Shaun Doherty first met John McCain during the Arizona senator’s first campaign for the presidency in 1999, and is just as enthusiastic about him nine years later.
“Sen. McCain is someone who has really made sacrifices for this country throughout his whole life,” Doherty said. “He’s someone I like because he’s reform-minded.”
Doherty couldn’t vote for McCain in 2000. He was too young.
This year, in what experts predict to be a tight election, Doherty, now 20 and a communications student at Rivier College, is doing everything he can to make sure McCain secures New Hampshire’s four electoral votes. He has organized phone banks and door knocks as well as an event featuring McCain that attracted approximately 1,000 people.
Doherty attributes the success of these events to Facebook, the popular social-networking Web site. Doherty started a Facebook group called New Hampshire Students for John McCain, which allows users to exchange ideas through the group’s message board and easily send e-mails to hundreds of people at once.
“I think it’s a great way to keep up on the campaign for younger people who might not use the traditional means of the newspaper or the Web site, but they are on Facebook or MySpace,” Doherty said.
Facebook and MySpace aren’t the only social networking Web sites making an impact in the 2008 race, though. Both political parties have designed social networking Web sites. In February, the College Republican National Committee launched STORM, a social networking Web site designed to inform young voters about conservative political candidates.
The site features a reward system called “impact points.” Users of STORM earn impact points by registering other voters to the site or organizing get-out-the-vote activities. At the end of each month top impact point earners have won prizes such as a free iPod Nano or free housing at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
The site has 132,000 users, according to Ashley Barbera, the committee’s communications director.
The Obama campaign also has a social networking site, mybarackobama.com, which functions almost the same way as STORM, but without the reward incentive.
The College Republican National Committee also designed a Web site called Where is the Red. The site followed four young Republicans on a cross-country road trip beginning on the East Coast and following a path west along contiguous Republican congressional districts.
Along the way, the students uploaded photos to Flickr, a social networking Web site and photo repository in which users can share personal photographs with one another. The students also uploaded video to YouTube, a site where users can share videos.
They also kept a journal using Twitter, a social networking site in which users communicate through blogging. When a user updates his or her blog, Twitter sends the update to everyone on the user’s friends list via an e-mail message called a Tweet.
Since social-networking Web sites debuted in 2004, voter registration among people 18 to 29 has increased exponentially, according to Stephanie Young, spokeswoman for Rock the Vote, a national nonpartisan organization created in 1990 to get young voters to the polls. According to Young, voter registration of people 18 to 29 doubled from 2004 to 2006 and tripled from 2006 to 2008.
“Young people are not happy with the direction of the country and they want to do something to change that,” Young said.
Rock the Vote’s Web outreach includes a Facebook message that users can send to their friends and a voter registration widget. A widget is defined as anything that can be embedded in a Web site, including advertising banners, “click here” links for downloading Web content and counters that track how many people have visited a Web site.
Rock the Vote also uses mobile text messaging to inform young voters who registered with the site about important dates such as registration deadlines. Young said that Rock the Vote plans to send a text message out on Election Day reminding young people to vote.
The use of mobile phone technology is critical in young voter outreach. Ben Hall, a 22-year-old social science major at Keene State College, signed up to be informed of Sen. Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick via mobile text message.
“I was definitely excited,” Hall said. “I was waiting to see if I was going to get [the text message] and checking the Drudge Report and Huffington Post.”
The Illinois senator made history when he became the first presidential candidate in history to announce his running mate by text message. The announcement of Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice president first went out at 3 a.m. on Aug. 23.
“Being in the 21st century, with the advent of the cell phone, most young voters don’t have a land line, so it forced all campaigns to be creative in the way we reach out to young voters,” said Larkin Barker, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in New Hampshire.
Barker declined to say how many people signed up to receive the message but said it was in the “hundreds of thousands.”
Hall said he is enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy because, he said, Obama was not part of the Washington crowd. “I think he’s a new face that we need” he said. “I feel like Washington is out of touch with regular Americans.”
As a member of the Keene State Democrats, Hall belongs to a Facebook group that supports Obama’s candidacy. He also uses databases of e-mail addresses that make it easier to send e-mails to large groups of people.
The use of mass messaging in both electronic and mobile forms also has made an impact on the 2008 race. Garth Corriveau, president of the New Hampshire chapter of the Young Democrats of America, said his chapter uses the e-mail database of the America Votes Coalition. The database contains names and e-mail addresses of union members, non-profit organizations and others interested in electing Democratic public officials.
Corriveau said the database was a helpful tool in electing young Democrats to the state legislature. “We’ve really been heavily emphasizing young Democrats helping young Democrats,” Corriveau said.
Young voters could play a key role in the 2008 election. According to Rock the Vote, people 18 to 29 make up one fifth of the country’s adult population. During this year’s New Hampshire primary, 18 percent of young voters went to the polls, a higher percentage than voters aged 30 to 39 and senior citizens, according to Rock the Vote.
Rock the Vote has registered more than 1 million young voters this election cycle, with a goal of registering 2 million, Young said.
Matt Segal, executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, a nonpartisan advocacy group dedicated to increasing civic education among young people, said he was confident young voters will play a big part in the election.
“I think that in 2008, young people are going to set the record straight and show that we are the swing demographic worthy of the candidates’ time, resources and energy because we can help them win,” Segal said.
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