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COVER STORY: THE YOUTH VOTE
Fast-Forwarding Networked Politics
Younger voters are more likely to get campaign news from friends online, unfiltered by the mainstream media.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign didn’t give Amanda Vaughn much notice last month when it asked the University of North Carolina junior to publicize a campus event featuring Chelsea Clinton.
With less than two days to turn out a crowd, Vaughn, president of the school’s “Heels for Hillary” chapter, quickly made plans to distribute fliers, make phone calls, and set up a Clinton table on the campus quad. But she mostly relied on Facebook, the online social network aimed primarily at college students and recent grads, to spread the word.
Vaughn created a “Facebook event”—a cyber-announcement/invitation—and sent it to the 50 or so Heels for Hillary members in the group’s Facebook community. Those recipients immediately passed on the invite to their lists of Facebook friends. Within 24 hours, Vaughn estimates, more than 800 students on campus had received a Facebook notification about the upcoming visit, which drew some 400 people.
“So many students have so many networks on campus,” Vaughn says. “One student in Heels for Hillary might have a completely different friend group that they can pull from that I never would have known about.”
To look at how Vaughn and other young activists participate in politics is to get a preview of what campaigns may look like in four, eight, or 12 years as her vast generation of “Millennials” and their younger siblings move into the electorate.
The heart of the change is a shift in how people get information and how they develop their opinions. Compared with older generations, young voters are less likely to learn about candidates through the filter of the conventional media and more likely to connect to politics through non-news Internet sites or each other.
The Millennial Generation is hardly immune to the messages and controversies that course through the mainstream media. But in a December survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Americans under 30 were considerably less likely than their elders to say they regularly acquire information about the presidential campaign from local or national television news, Sunday morning interview programs, or daily newspapers (although they reported watching cable television news at about the same rate as older generations).
Those findings didn’t surprise Vaughn. “People my age—we’re so busy, we don’t have time to watch TV,” she says. Televised campaign ads may make more of an impression than TV news, she believes, but even that comes with a generational twist: Vaughn says she and her friends are more likely to use their laptops to access the ads online than to catch them on the nightly news.
Often, she says, she looks at a campaign ad because a friend has sent an Internet link to it. “I’ll have people e-mail me every day with links to new ads that they’ve found,” she says. The links to ads that regularly turn up in Vaughn’s in-box, like the Facebook notices she used to drum up an audience for Chelsea Clinton, are among the new tools and techniques shaping the political lives of young voters.
Increasingly, young people obtain much of their political “news” from peers and then pass it along—in what amounts to a shift from a vertical to a horizontal model of communication. Young people are thus the leading edge of the larger evolution from network-era presidential campaigns that revolved primarily around television to networked-era campaigns designed to inspire as many people as possible to advocate for the candidate through personal communications with friends, relatives, and even strangers.
The principal force behind this new political era is an explosion in connectivity, especially through social-networking sites such as Facebook or the competing MySpace (whose members tend to be less affluent but somewhat more diverse in age) and the nonstop communication provided by e-mail, instant messaging, cellphone calls, and texting. Pew has found that young people are much more likely than older folks to use social-networking sites and rely on them to obtain campaign information; to turn to the Internet for campaign news; and to communicate with text messages. They are also much more likely to discuss politics online and to view campaign-related videos on the Internet, and are somewhat more likely to visit candidate websites than the generations ahead of them, according to survey results released last month by the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey.
The common thread in these findings is young people’s desire to have control over—and direct access to—information. Zack Hawkins, the 28-year-old president of the North Carolina Young Democrats, says that rather than turning to cable news when a major campaign event happens, his friends are likely to “immediately go on YouTube to look for the clip, to see it for themselves.”
The layers of communication binding the Millennial Generation together create a powerful multiplier effect: Each time a campaign motivates a teen or 20-something, the ripple can spread far and wide. Because young people tend to spend so much time interacting online, “they have much larger social networks than earlier generations,” says Averell (Ace) Smith, the veteran political organizer who directed Clinton’s campaigns in California and Texas and is now running her effort in North Carolina. “If you talk to 10,000 young people [at a campaign event], by the time they are done talking to all their friends you are talking to 100,000 or 200,000 people.”
Hawkins agrees. Facebook and MySpace, he says, have fueled his group’s growth not only by providing a convenient place for people to get information about its activities but also by enabling the organization to tap into the social networks of all its members. “One member of Young Democrats might tell five people about something they’re doing through Facebook,” he says, echoing Vaughn. When the group hosted its annual convention earlier this month, a head-turning 500 people came out—partly, Hawkins thinks, because of the excitement surrounding the presidential campaign but also because of the online buzz about the event.
Micah Sifry, executive editor and co-founder of TechPresident, a website that studies the interaction between technology and politics, thinks that the high level of turnout among young people in this year’s Democratic presidential contest may foreshadow a lasting increase in participation. “Yes, there is this sense that these elections matter more, because of the [Iraq] war, or global warming, or President Bush. And that will motivate participation, too,” Sifry says. “But when you consider how much time these folks are spending networked to each other, whether it is through their phones or their Facebook pages, they are basically immersed in references to politics or causes.… These kids are drenched in politics.” That exposure, Sifry maintains, “doesn’t make them all politically obsessed, but it is integrated into their daily background noise” in a way that counters “some of the alienation from politics” common since the 1960s.
Flip-Flops on the Ground
Although young people rely enormously on the Internet to obtain and share campaign information, presidential campaign organizing isn’t moving entirely online. Barack Obama’s campaign has outpaced its rivals in using the Internet to mobilize support, especially among the young. But much of his student organizing effort in North Carolina still depends on old-fashioned boots—or flip-flops—on the ground.
When members of UNC’s Students for Obama chapter met to organize their voter-registration drive, they built it around a door-to-door canvass in undergraduate residence halls that they dubbed “DormStorming.” On a drizzly Saturday morning, about two dozen volunteers gathered outside a campus dining hall before dividing into groups and heading into the dorms.
One group included juniors Sandy Preiss and Justin Bailey and freshman Will Boyle. Some students in Boyle’s dorm were just stirring after a late night. Others insisted they were already registered. (“So they say,” Preiss muttered.) The volunteers scored an occasional success. A few Obama supporters promised to vote. One undecided woman hinted at a conversion. “Well, I’m technically a Republican,” she said, giggling, “but my best friend wants me to vote for Obama, so I might.”
Knocking on doors in pursuit of political support was difficult, draining work for the young activists. That’s as it has been for generations.
What’s new is the source of the motivation that gets the students out to canvass on a damp morning. During a break, Bailey noted that his Facebook page provides him a personalized news feed that lists activities and events that each friend in his network has agreed to participate in. “It just pops up on your news feed that your friend is going canvassing for Obama,” Bailey says. And on a gray morning, he adds, that’s inspiration enough to get up and get involved—even if you need an umbrella to do it.
Carrie Dann is covering the presidential campaign as an NBC/National Journal reporter.