After the election, there was a great deal of fingerpointing over which demographic was responsible for our loss: pro-choice women, gay marriage, security moms, and everybody's old standby, those apathetic, lazy youth voters. While most of these assertions have since turned out to be flawed, I take the scapegoating of youth voters a bit personally, both because it devalues the work that many of us did to help register and turn out youth voters in our communities, and because - as we now see - it wasn't even accurate:
Student voter turnout is hailed; Campus polling place to be a model
The Davis Enterprise
Voting among 18- to 26-year-olds in Davis increased the turnout in 21/2 years by tenfold, Yolo County Clerk Freddie Oakley said this week. A UC Davis student has received a grant for a campus voter turnout project and will use the money to try to expand it to other UC campuses.
The increase is being credited to a polling place on campus the week before the November election, an effort last year by Oakley, UCD student Brian McInnis, local activist Norbie Kumagai and others.
"This experiment was so successful," [Yolo County Clerk Freddie Oakley] told the Davis City Council on Tuesday evening, "that we're now going to extend early voting in Yolo County to include not just the UC Davis campus but also a satellite location in West Sacramento and one in rural Yolo County, probably in Esparto.
"Our experience with early voting is that it ... removes a barrier to voting and as your county clerk and the administrator of your elections, I firmly believe that any barrier we can remove, we ought to remove, when it comes to voting."
Convenience and accessibility were behind the idea last year by McInnis and Kumagai, who approached Oakley with the project.
County elections officials, the Associated Students of UC Davis and the UCD Graduate Student Association set up an early voting polling station on campus in late October and early November.
The booth proved successful. Voter turnout among Davis 18- to 26-year-olds was 8,880 people, nearly 69 percent of those registered to vote here.
More than two years earlier, in the March 2002 primary election, just 888 Davis residents in that age group voted, according to a news release. That was 11 percent of those registered. In November of that year, turnout was 33 percent, 2,343 people.
While their voting rate was still below the 81% Davis average (registered voters), the net increase of 7,992 new 18-26 voters may very well have tipped the scales in the state senate race for Mike Machado (D-Linden), who won with a narrow 9,980 vote margin, denying Schwartzeneggar any claim to coattails, as Ahnold had strongly targeted Machado, and poured tons of $ into the race on behalf of John Podesto (R-Stockton). Those numbers also undoubtedly exclude a fair number of students who voted absentee in their home districts, so the overall youth turnout was probably higher than 69%.
So how did Norb and Brian do it? A series of registration drives at apartment complexes and dorms on move-in day, an early-voting booth at the UCD student union building, so that students weren't forced to choose between midterms and voting on election day. In addition, campus Dems and the Aggies Beat Bush coalition (largely ex-Deaniacs) coordinated with the Yolo County Dems to GOTV, starting at 6am flyering and ending with phone banking until the polls closed.
When viewed together with Chris Bowers' series of diaries at MyDD showing that young voters are increasingly more liberal and Democratic, as well as strong supporters of marriage equality, I am increasingly convinced that the future of liberalism and the Democratic party depends on this kind of increased youth turnout. Higher under-30 voters' turnout nationwide probably helped dem candidates hold the line in several races, especially in districts with college towns (where they weren't blocked from voting by Rethug county clerks and Secretaries of State like Ohio's Blackwell).
And yet, there are still far too many youth voters who still aren't voting. According to the recent Pew Research Center poll on voter groups, the category of non-voters, or Bystanders are predominantly young (39% are under age 30), non-religious, Hispanic, uneducated, and tend not to pay much attention to political news. Democratic voter registration drives and GOTV programs, often based out of unions or universities, tend to miss these potential voters; politicians of both parties, noting that these people rarely vote, don't bother to address their issues (or address them at all, for the most part), which then in turn ensures that the Bystanders continue to discount the whole process, since it does not care about their hopes or fears.
So what to do? To be honest, I have no answers (hell, I don't even have any informed suggestions). I have spent my entire life moving in educated, upper-middle class circles, and while I understand my fellow college students, I cannot claim that what moves me will necessarily move these other youth voters to the polls. But it is clear to me that if we really want to make further gains in the youth vote, that the Bystanders are where we're going to have to start looking. While I've got some ideas - living wage campaigns, organizing low wage service industries like SEIU's efforts to take on WalMart, and recruiting leaders from within the non-student youth and actually listening to what they have to say - I'm interested in what other Kossacks have to say. Those of you with experience in these things, or who were once callow apolitical youths once upon a time, how do we make this party and this democracy meaningful to these nonvoters? How do we get these kids to vote, and to become full participants in our political system?
If we can bump the student vote from 11 to 69% with a bit of legwork and voting accessibility, surely we can make some inroads into the non-student youth. If we want to make an impact on the 2006 elections, we ought to start brainstorming now.