Cross-posted from Future Majority - a blog about progressive youth politics.
Here's a great example of the media spoiling for a fight that just isn't there. The Wall Street Journal has a dizzying piece in today's edition suggesting that Sarah Palin is the GOP's ticket to connecting with young voters and cutting into Obama's sizable lead among our peers. The only problem is that almost every fact in the piece disputes that thesis.
Here's a rundown on why I'm not buying it.
With colleges back in session and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on board as the Republican vice presidential nominee, social conservatives are intensifying efforts to woo young voters, a demographic they once all but conceded to the Democrats.
The article certainly isn't talking about the McCain campaign here. If you go to the McCain/Palin website, there is not student or youth section to be found. As far as I know, they have no field plan for reaching out to young voters, and with only 50 odd days before the election, almost no time in which to execute a new plan from scratch:
Sen. Obama has spent well over a year building ties to young voters and college campuses. Young voters are notoriously hard to get to the polls, unless they're repeatedly contacted in person. "It's not clear," Mr. Green said, "that the McCain campaign has the infrastructure."
So who, exactly, is going to be connecting with young voters on behalf of the campaign?
At a string of Christian rock concerts in the swing states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the nonprofit group Redeem the Vote plans to mobilize voters by interspersing the music with calls to end legal abortion.
The antiabortion group Students for Life, meanwhile, has announced plans to flood YouTube with videos urging young people to activism in the fall campaign.
Ah, Christian Right groups looking for some hot culture war action! Only problem is, most young people don't care about the culture war. They've got bigger fish to fry like Global Warming and a tanking economy that threatens their debt-ridden future:
They plan to focus their youth effort on a few issues, including abortion. Although voters of all ages rank abortion quite low as a political priority, polls show the under-30 crowd is receptive to strict limits on abortion, and young evangelicals -- potential swing voters this election -- are more conservative than their parents on the issue.
...
Pew Research Center poll from 2006 found that 46% of people age 18 to 30 believe abortion should be banned outright or permitted only in a few circumstances. But that still means more than half support legal abortion. And many young people know someone who has made the choice to end a pregnancy; some 600,000 abortions a year are performed on women under 25.
So how effective has Palin, the GOP's new culture warrior, been so far in converting young voters to the Republican nominee?
Polls taken after the Republican convention don't show Sen. McCain cutting into the Democrats' lead among young voters; his support hovers around 33% in that group. But conservatives aren't giving up.
To recap:
Lacking any infrastructure with which to reach out to young voters, Sarah Palin is going to help the McCain campaign eat into Obama's lead among young voters. This will happen because conservative christian groups will hold a few one-off concerts, possibly after voter registration deadlines have passed, and targeted to voters who were never going to vote for Obama anyway. These concerts will focus on an issue of little voting significance to Millennials. So far, there is no evidence that Palin's presence on the ticket or these strategies will have any impact on the race.
And how did the Wall Street Journal frame this article?
Palin's Entry Gives GOP Shot at Capturing the Youth Vote
Right . . .
I'm not sweating this one . . .
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