Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Poll Track: National Polling On The Youth Vote · Poll Track: Polling Generation Y (4/20/05) · Insider Interview: Adrian Talbot On Organizing The Youth Vote (3/9/05) · Insider Interview: Jehmu Greene of Rock The Vote (11/5/03) · Insider Interview: Joe Trippi On Internet Campaigning (7/9/03) · Well-Read Wonk: "A New Engagement?" (1/11/07) · [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web "Rock The Vote" voter registration page · Young Republicans Resource Center

By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, March 9, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- During the first presidential campaign of the new millennium, Harvard students Erin Ashwell and Trevor Dryer, like their counterparts at colleges across the country, eagerly awaited the thrill of voting in a national election for the first time. Their anticipation was tempered, however, by dismissive talk about the apparent political disaffection of young people and the youth vote's irrelevance in the 2000 elections.

This glum assessment fed on data showing that voter participation among the youngest cohort of America's citizens has been declining since 1972, the first election in which 18-year-olds could vote for president. Over the years, youth has not fulfilled its promise as a demographic voting bloc and has not determined the outcome of a single presidential contest.

This perception, although accurate as far as it went, didn't strike Ashwell and Dryer as the whole story. "In 2000, there was a lot of press about how young people don't vote, don't get involved, don't care about politics," Ashwell recalls. "Trevor and I wanted to know if it was true. It didn't seem right: All of our friends were into community service." Although they were only college sophomores -- or perhaps because they were college sophomores -- the pair decided to test conventional wisdom. They also sought to shed light on the paradox of a generation of young activists who devoted hours each week to tutoring underprivileged children, volunteering at food banks, and promoting environmental activism -- but who couldn't be bothered to register or vote.

Seven years later, the results of their curiosity have opened a door on the inner political lives of a singular and highly motivated generation of Americans who were awakened by 9/11 and galvanized by the Iraq war, and who (contrary to initial reports) went to the polls in large numbers in 2004. College voters also almost certainly made the difference in pushing Montana's Jon Tester and Virginia's Jim Webb across the finish line in 2006, thereby giving Democrats control of the Senate.

Graphic: The Jump In Youth Turnout Voters aged 18 through 21 reported the biggest increases in turnout in 2004, with double-digit percentage point gains. Self-reported turnout among some other age groups actually declined from the 2000 election.

None of that had happened yet when Ashwell and Dryer began delving into the attitudes of their fellow collegians via a nationwide survey, but the project they launched continued after they graduated. (Both finished law school and passed the bar; Ashwell now works for the Justice Department, and Dryer clerks for a federal judge in Nevada.) Over the ensuing years, the poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government has penetrated more deeply than other surveys, using the Internet and other innovative techniques, such as having undergraduates help formulate the questions.

The survey has drawn a picture of a unique generation. Today's youth are an underrated force in American civic life -- difficult to stereotype, with attitudes markedly different from those of their predecessors. College students overwhelmingly favor the partial privatization of Social Security, a conservative Republican position and one at odds with the preferences of older Americans. Yet they are far more supportive of gay marriage, gay adoption, and gays' being allowed to serve openly in the military than any other age group, views that place them in the vanguard of Democratic liberalism. In many respects, they are available to both major parties and, judging by their weak party affiliation, would be receptive to an independent presidential candidate. The 2006 IOP poll [PDF] went even further, concluding that the traditional labels of "liberal" and "conservative" don't adequately capture the complexity of college students' attitudes. One in four college students identify themselves as "religious centrists," a stance that indicates deep concern over the moral direction of the country -- and that encompasses issues such as environmental protection, universal health care, and free trade.

Today's college students are not isolationist, and they know they are at war -- they do not concur with documentarian Michael Moore's characterization that their nation is fighting a "fictitious" war -- but they are the furthest thing from unilateralists. The Institute of Politics poll shows that college students are twice as likely as older Americans to favor a United Nations solution to a foreign crisis than a plan conceived in Washington.

These young people are so little understood that many of the 2006 congressional campaigns ignored them utterly, although candidates who did paid a price for their inattention. Social scientists can't even agree on what to call this generation. Some label those ages 18 to 29 "Generation Y," to distinguish them from the Generation X-ers who preceded them. Others call them "Millennials." For a while they were known as "Generation 9/11," but then the other searing event in their lives -- the Iraq war -- altered that equation. The Pew Research Center calls them simply "Generation Next." They are certainly not the "Me Generation." Harvard professor David C. King, research director at the Institute of Politics, calls them "Generation We." Is that an exaggeration? King and his colleagues will soon know. The institute's poll is now surveying college-age Americans not enrolled in institutions of higher learning. Its results, due in mid-April, will help flesh out the current generation of young people as a political force.

The data might even help reveal the identity of the next president of the United States.

Smart Enough To Vote
The notion that the White House rightfully belongs to the young is not a new concept; it's just one that never panned out. In the 1960s and 1970s, liberal activists rhapsodized about how young voters would soon assert themselves en masse to elect progressive -- that is to say, dovish -- presidents. This was a key rationale behind the speedy adoption of the 26th Amendment (which lowered the voting age to 18) in 1971, when the context of the nation's political discourse was the war in Vietnam. Similar sentiments were expressed during the 2004 election cycle, and at high decibels. "Vote or Die" was not a rap song by Diddy; it was the official slogan he coined for a mainstream organization called Rock the Vote, which sought to register young people. Officially the group was politically neutral, but as the old Irish quip goes, its leaders knew which side they were neutral on. In its Web site plugs and at musical concerts, Rock the Vote's front men recited Democratic Party talking points as reasons the young should get involved in politics -- the stalemate in Iraq chief among them.

The grim logic of armed combat is that some who take to the battlefield will be wounded or killed and that those casualties are disproportionately the young. Little wonder, then, that wartime often sparks calls for increased enfranchisement for those who bear the brunt of the fighting. Two years after the Civil War ended, a delegate to a New York constitutional convention lobbied for lowering the voting age, noting, "We hold men at 18 liable to the draft and require them to peril their lives on the battlefield." Months after America entered World War II, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, R-Mich., made the same pitch while sponsoring a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age to 18. As the Korean War was coming to a close, former five-star Gen. Dwight Eisenhower did the same in his first State of the Union address as president.

"For years, our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have, in time of peril, been summoned to fight for America," Ike said. "They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons."

But that political process worked slowly. Georgia unilaterally lowered the age in 1943. Kentucky followed 12 years later. Alaska and Hawaii were subsequently admitted to the union and established the voting age at 19 and 20, respectively. In the late 1960s, Vietnam brought the issue to the fore again, largely because of the draft needed to wage an increasingly unpopular war. In congressional testimony, Ted Sorensen, a speechwriter for and confidant of President Kennedy, foreshadowed the blunt prose of Diddy. "Those between the ages of 18 and 21 ... have no voice whatsoever in the process which determines whether they live or die," he said. "If taxation without representation was tyranny, then conscription without representation is slavery."

In 1968, both major parties' platforms included lowering the voting age to 18. After the campaign, some Democrats expressed the belief that Hubert Humphrey would have been elected president if 18-year-olds had been allowed to vote. This may have been wishful thinking. The 1968 Democratic ticket was hardly perceived as a standard-bearer for the peace movement. And although it's true that liberal Sens. Robert Kennedy and Mike Mansfield championed a lower voting age, no politician was more glowing in his support than Richard Nixon -- the man destined to sign the 26th Amendment into law.

"The younger generation is better educated, it knows more about politics, more about the world, than many of the older people," Nixon said at a campaign stop in St. Louis. "They are smart enough to vote."

To be sure, doubters existed: then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., bottled up legislation for years. His rejoinder to the "old enough to fight, old enough to vote" argument was: "The draft age and the voting age are as different as chalk is from cheese." This logic, if it can be called that, was echoed by The New York Times. "The requirements for a good soldier and for a good voter are not the same," the newspaper editorialized in 1967. "For the soldier, youthful enthusiasm and physical endurance are of primary importance; for the voter, maturity of judgment far outweighs other qualifications."

Such views did not prevail, however, and in 1970, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., attached a provision to lower the voting age to a reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Nixon promptly signed it, but the Supreme Court ruled that making the voting age uniform required a constitutional amendment. Congress swiftly passed the measure and sent it on to the states. Ratification took under 100 days, less time than for any other amendment to the Constitution. Nixon signed it in the summer of 1971. By the following summer, Gary Hart, campaign manager for George McGovern, was predicting that the 25 million new voters would be the key to the Democrats' victory in 1972. Embedded in that idea was the hope that granting young people the vote might have a pacifying effect on the body politic.

There were reasons to believe this. At the signing ceremony for the 26th Amendment, White House image-makers surrounded Nixon with a clean-cut teenage choral group far different in appearance from the scruffy anti-war activists who had been protesting Vietnam. But when a White House correspondent asked one of the hand-picked 17-year-olds whether he planned to vote Republican in 1972, the lad replied, "Depends if we're out of Vietnam."

Most American troops were home by Election Day that year, and although just over 50 percent of the nation's 18-to-24-year-olds went to the polls, they didn't help McGovern. "After Nixon won in 49 states," former Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., recalled with a chuckle, "those that were the drivers behind the movement said, 'Oh, well, next time!' "

In a sense, the Democrats are still waiting. To their consternation, this age group has never voted in greater numbers than it did in 1972. In 2004, exit polls showed that John Kerry won the under-30 vote over President Bush by 11 percentage points. But Census Bureau data also show that although more young voters went to the polls that year than in 2000, overall voter turnout still increases steadily as Americans age.

The initial 2004 exit-poll data led to a myth that took hold rapidly. "The unprecedented get-out-the-vote campaigns turned out so many young Americans," wrote New York Times columnist John Tierney, "that their share of the electorate went from 17 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2004." Others were more caustic, including conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, who chortled, "The youth vote is bunk." He was just warming up. "It's a mirage," he said. "Fool's gold ... a media confabulation. Nonsense. Hooey. Baloney, bilge, hogwash, and hooey."

Given the confident assurances of victory from Kerry's staff in the weeks before the election, the young were an irresistible target for right-leaning commentators. But there's a wonderful thing about politics: Change does come. It came in 2004, Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, and a close look at the polls suggests that a sea change might be on the way for 2008.

New Kids On The Block
John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president in U.S. history, once observed that whether he served one term or two, he would be "an awkward age" when he left the presidency -- too old to start a new career but too young to pen his memoirs from his rocking chair. JFK envisioned a new kind of presidential library, housed at Harvard, where he had matriculated in 1940, that would serve as a base of operations from which he could think, write, travel, and teach.

Tragedy in Dallas doomed that vision, but his brothers, widow, and former aides founded the Institute of Politics, envisioning a learning center for undergraduates where real-world practitioners of politics, government, and journalism would engage and encourage students. That dream became reality. In 2000, when Erin Ashwell and Trevor Dryer hit on their idea for a poll of college students nationwide, they took it to the institute's executive director, Catherine McLaughlin, and director, Alan Simpson. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, was gung-ho; so was McLaughlin, a veteran of Democratic campaigns who has been at the Kennedy School for 20 years except for a stint as tour manager for the band New Kids on the Block. When her new kids on the institute's block talked about doing a national poll by themselves, she put them in touch with a Massachusetts-based pollster named John Della Volpe, who spent a semester of Wednesday nights helping the students to devise their survey and to conduct two focus groups of college students from the Boston area.

College students had been famously difficult to poll scientifically, mainly because it's so hard to get their phone numbers, and the expense involved meant that few reliable surveys of their attitudes on politics were done. (Cellphones, which legally cannot be used in polling, have made this problem far worse. In the fall of 2006, the Institute of Politics poll switched to Internet questioning, increased its sample size to 2,400, and, for the first time, included noncollege youth.) Back in 2000, using traditional survey methods, the first institute poll [PDF] was based on input from 800 college students across the nation. The sample was half-female, half-male, almost all of them younger than 24 -- and, interestingly, no one from Harvard. The poll's results posed a direct challenge to an institution dedicated to getting young people interested in politics -- and raised intriguing questions for the two major political parties.

"Polling college students is tough," says Richard G. Niemi, a University of Rochester professor who studies college voting. "They are hard to get on the phone and hard to get to respond -- and the political science community is still concerned that Internet polling is not perfectly representative. But for college students, this Institute of Politics study is the best sampling we have."

Released in April 2000, "Attitudes Toward Public Service: A National Survey of College Undergraduates" had found that although 59.5 percent of the students surveyed had participated in active community service in the previous 12 months, only 16 percent had signed on to a government, political, or issue-oriented organization and only 6.5 percent had volunteered for any kind of political campaign. The students' attitudes toward government ranged from cynicism to antipathy: Almost two-thirds of them said they didn't trust the federal government to "do the right thing" all or most of the time. Asked about the motivations of politicians, three-fourths of the respondents said that elected officials "seem to be motivated by selfish reasons." More than 70 percent said that America's political institutions were unconcerned with the desires of college students. (The news media didn't fare any better.)

A study by the National Association of Secretaries of State showed that turnout among young voters in the 1996 presidential election was the lowest on record. The study hinted at an even worse performance in 2000. Eight years of Bill Clinton's White House, a contentiously partisan Congress, and a scandal-mongering media had produced nearly the opposite effect that Clinton's boyhood hero JFK had had on the nation's young people. "They were just turned off to politics," Della Volpe says. "Community service was something they could get their hands on. You could feed a hungry person or teach a struggling high school kid his math problem, and it was tangible. Political success was more ephemeral. We'd get these responses in the focus groups: 'What difference does it make who the president is? It's just some old white guy.' To them, politics wasn't ever cool, and it wasn't very fun."

The dismal forecast for November 2000 came true. According to the Census Bureau's supplemental information [PDF] (available several months after each election), the turnout among voters ages 18 to 24 stayed at the all-time-low 1996 figure of 36 percent -- and turnout among 18-to-21-year-olds fell below 30 percent for the first time.

The Institute of Politics had ended its first poll on a gallant note, stressing the need to make it clear to students that politics is an effective way to bring about social change, as well as a "noble and honorable form of public service." But Della Volpe remembers thinking that the findings were not only distressing in their own right but also likely to mean the end of the poll itself. Who cared what young people thought about politics if young people themselves didn't care enough to vote?

Then the planes hit.

The End of Apathy
When the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred, former Sen. David Pryor of Arkansas was director of the Institute of Politics. Acting on gut instinct, he ginned up the poll again. The results this time couldn't have been more different. "The attacks of 9/11 totally changed the way the Millennial Generation thinks about politics," Della Volpe says today. "Overnight, their attitudes were more like the Greatest Generation."

A stunning 60 percent of college students in the institute's new survey [PDF] said they had faith in the government to do the right thing all or most of the time, compared with 36 percent in 2000. Fully three-fourths of them expressed "trust" in the military, 69 percent said they trusted the president, and 62 percent said they trusted Congress. Four out of five supported the then-commencing U.S. military action in Afghanistan, with 68 percent saying they favored using ground troops -- a step that appeared imminent. The same number, 68 percent, rated terrorism as the top issue facing the United States.

"The tragic events of September 11 gave a sense of purpose, and new meaning to the concept of public service," the survey report stated. "The events were a truly national experience that made politics and government tangible to college students in a way not apparent in the 2000 study."

Yet two intriguing elements in the 2001 poll were little noticed at the time. First, the college students' newfound hawkishness did not replace their altruism; it supplemented it. The number participating in community service increased, to 69 percent. The second facet that, in hindsight, seems significant is that in the days just after 9/11, college students' support for a military solution, while quite high, was noticeably lower than that of older voters. Support for air strikes in Afghanistan was 92 percent among the population as a whole (according to an ABC poll); 80 percent of the general population favored a ground invasion there; and 34 percent of college students said that the U.S. should have spent more time seeking a diplomatic solution with the Taliban, compared with only 14 percent of Americans of all ages.

The institute's poll became an annual fixture, and for the next five years, a trend slowly emerged. In 2001, the three out of five 18-to-24-year-olds attending college trended slightly Republican (31 percent to 29 percent), with the largest group (39 percent) identifying themselves as independents. By 2002 and 2003, with Iraq dimming the searing memory of 9/11, this changed. In spring 2003, a Gallup Poll showed Bush leading the generic "Democratic candidate" 49 percent to 36 percent among Americans as a whole, while among college students his lead was only 34 percent to 32 percent -- a result within the survey's margin of error.

Clearly the war in Iraq was driving this split. In the spring of 2003, 65 percent of college students supported the war (compared with 78 percent of the entire country), but a trend toward multinationalism -- particularly support for the United Nations -- was building among the students. Notice the differences when respondents were asked in 2003 which statement was closer to their view regarding the rebuilding of Iraq:

U.N. should play the major role in rebuilding Iraq with U.S. assistance

• IOP poll of students: 61%
• NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of adults: 41%

U.S. should play the major role in rebuilding Iraq with some assistance from other countries

• IOP poll of students: 36%
• NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of adults: 54%

This comparison, more than any other, showed that the Millennials were, in Della Volpe's words, "creating a unique political voice of their own." By then, the institute was polling twice a year, and the October survey underscored the point about the students' singular identity. In that poll, college students revealed themselves to be more pro-Bush than their older counterparts but simultaneously more skeptical of the Iraq war. The youth vote in the impending presidential race, it seemed, was up for grabs, and by the time of the April 2004 institute poll, John Kerry had emerged on college campuses as a 10-point favorite.

Inside the Kerry campaign and in groups such as Rock the Vote, the high expectations were palpable: The 18-to-24-year-olds were going to lead Democrats back into the White House. But Election Day brought heartburn to liberals, starting with erroneous early exit polls that seemed to presage a big Kerry win and then compounded by a widely distributed news service article (also based on exit polls) asserting that the youth-vote surge had not materialized.

It was this dispatch that engendered the scorn from the Right. As Michelle Malkin held forth on the "fizzled youth vote," Matt Drudge crowed, "Vote or Die -- or Whatever." But this interpretation was mistaken. First, to make a projection in each state, exit pollsters are positioned in key precincts throughout the country. But David King, the Harvard professor, whose specialty is analyzing voting patterns, says that exit polls weren't taken near college campuses. Furthermore, Election Night stories confused turnout with vote share. Months later, after the Census Bureau released its supplemental information, it became apparent that the number of voters younger than 25 had jumped 11 points -- compared with an increase of 4 points among those 25 and older. "One of the missed angles of the 2004 election is that college-age people drove the increase in voter turnout nationally," Jeanne Shaheen, the institute's current director, said at the time. Moreover, this vote definitely broke Kerry's way. In other words, if by some weird constitutional amendment only those younger than 30 could vote, Kerry would have won in a landslide.

"You could sure say that," said Kathleen Barr, research director of Young Voter Strategies, a nonpartisan project affiliated with George Washington University. "It was a pretty big change from the previous presidential election, too, when 18-to-29-year-olds were about evenly split: 48 percent for [Al] Gore, 46 percent for Bush."

Cost Benefits of the Young
In 2002, David W. Nickerson made a name for himself as a graduate student at Yale by writing a thesis showing that young voters were just as susceptible to the blandishments of politicians as anyone else, but that it was three times as costly for a political campaign to reach them. In other words, for every dollar spent getting older voters to the polls, it took three dollars to get voters younger than 25 there. If one also considers that young voters are more fickle than older ones -- other studies have shown that they are more likely to change their preferences in midcampaign -- only a very stubborn campaign manager would spend money wooing the young. But five years can be a long time in politics, especially when a nation is at war, and most especially when technology is developing rapidly. "That calculus is wrong now," King said. "This is the stock you want to invest in -- the young."

What has happened in the meantime? Well, Iraq, and the online YouTube and Facebook, to name three things.

It's common political wisdom that George Allen of Virginia narrowly lost his Senate seat -- and the Republican majority along with it -- after he was videotaped calling one of Democrat Webb's volunteers a "macaca." What's often forgotten is that Webb's campaign, not knowing quite what to do with the footage, simply posted it on YouTube. The effect was devastating. Already in this election cycle, the masochistic political junkie can watch John Edwards primp his hair for two minutes; can listen as Hillary Rodham Clinton butchers the National Anthem; and can glimpse John McCain dozing off during the president's State of the Union address -- all on YouTube, free of charge.

S.R. Sidarth, the young man whom Allen derogated, is of Indian descent. He also was a University of Virginia senior at the time. King's analysis of the counties that broke for Webb clearly shows that the Democratic challenger reaped a bonanza of votes in inner-city Richmond and Norfolk, with their large minority populations, and, most noticeably, in the roster of cities and towns with college campuses: Williamsburg, Radford, Fredericksburg -- and Charlottesville, where Sidarth attended school.

The evidence is even stronger, King believes, that Montana Republican Conrad Burns lost his Senate seat to Democratic challenger Tester on the basis of the college-age vote -- a turnout supplemented by a same-day voter-registration law that helped maximize the passions of youth. "Tester simply doesn't win without the youth vote and the Election Day registration," King says. He has just finished work on a study in which 56 campaign managers involved in 2006 congressional races were interviewed about their outreach efforts aimed at young voters. The questions ranged from what technology they employed to how many of their staffers were younger than 30. Did they upload to YouTube, make appeals on MySpace, or set up a Facebook page, and raise money online?

The candidates received letter grades in several areas and an overall grade as well, but in the end, the results were more nuanced. King's and Della Volpe's assessment is not that e-mails and podcasts have replaced political volunteers at the grassroots. It's that the new technology has altered Nickerson's cost-benefit analysis. It is now far less expensive to reach young volunteers and voters. But a candidate still must have charisma and a message, and be able to translate high-technology methods into good, old-fashioned ground organizing.

"The new tech only gets you to the old tech, which is people," King says. "We found that they needed two things. The first was outreach -- asking young people for their vote in a way that makes sense to them. The second was the use of staff and interns and technologies to bring young people into a campaign -- to turn technologies into ground troops."

In the new world, glitches are unavoidable. Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy online but on a platform that didn't allow visitors to her Web site to e-mail her speech to their friends. Edwards attracted negative publicity by hiring two bloggers who have used intemperate language for years. The Republicans can't seem to get much traction online, although McCain's campaign has an attractive billboard for its candidate on MySpace. So far, the candidate who seems most attuned to the rhythms of college campuses is Barack Obama. Instead of retaining bloggers, his campaign hired media specialists who set up platforms giving the tools of communication to interested visitors, most of whom appear to be young. On my.barackobama.com, guests are invited to find Obama supporters in their area, help plan events -- and blog themselves. "This Campaign is about You," it says.

"It's still about the message first, and the first hurdle on that score is Iraq. So as the college kids have moved to the left on the war, he has the right message, too," Della Volpe said of Obama. "There's no question his Web site platform is at a higher level than the others, too, which isn't surprising. He's the youngest of the candidates, and his background is as an organizer."

Time will tell about all of that. But this much is undeniable: Generation We is bigger than Generation X, and a surge in the birthrate that began in 1989 (it is sometimes called the "echo boom") means that a large group of potential voters is coming of age just in time for the 2008 presidential election. Any increase in turnout percentage will compound the numbers. Della Volpe is now in the field conducting another poll, which the institute will release next month. It will be the first to allow comparisons of attitudes between students and young people not attending college. If they are the same as their classroom-bound colleagues, 2008 might be a watershed year in American politics -- and another blue Election Night for Republicans.

Generation Next Today's 18-to-24-year-olds are an underrated force in civic life, with attitudes markedly different from those of Generation X-ers and older voters. "One of the missed angles of the 2004 election is that college-age people drove the increase in voter turnout nationally." The Iraq war got their attention. MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook have made them easier to reach. 60% of college students trusted the government after 9/11 to do the right thing.

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