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03 February 2010
Young Voters Turn Out
By Sam Barrett
This article is excerpted from the book American Citizenship, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 4.57MB).
One day in late August 2008 while vacationing with her family, Ashley Gunn, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, answered a phone call from a number she did not recognize. On the line was a representative from the Republican Party who told her that she had been selected to give a speech at the Republican National Convention, a huge meeting of top party officials in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the party would officially nominate John McCain as its candidate for president.
Gunn had been chosen, she found out, based on her exemplary record of community service and political involvement in Republican politics. She was stunned: Not only was the convention merely days away, but she had no idea she had even been under consideration to speak. “All of these things kind of fell into place and I just happened to be the right person that they wanted to talk to,” said Gunn.
Gunn accepted the invitation and soon after was in Minnesota as an official participant in one of the largest events in national politics. Although she was still a college student, she was treated like any other party insider. “I felt important,” she said. “It was a lot of fun.”
When it finally came time for her speech, she smiled out at an arena filled with thousands of people, including senior members of the Republican Party and representatives of almost every national news organization in the United States. She spoke of her work to help underprivileged American families find affordable housing. The core beliefs and principles that drove her to service, Gunn said, were those that motivated John McCain to seek the presidency and forge a new path for the country. Her words received a rousing ovation: Her youthful exuberance and commitment to the democratic process struck a chord with the audience.
Gunn’s experiences in St. Paul may be unique for a person of her age, but her political engagement certainly is not. All across the United States, young people of diverse backgrounds volunteer countless hours campaigning for the issues and candidates they believe in. Nowhere was this commitment more apparent than in the November 2008 presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain: Many college students, finally of legal voting age, worked tirelessly to educate the public about the candidates and ensure that their generation’s voice was heard on Election Day.
Some University of Pennsylvania (Penn) students, like Christopher Newman, got involved by chance. Already enthralled by then-Senator Obama’s message of change, Newman was especially excited to learn that Obama had a chance to win a majority of electoral votes in his home state of Virginia — a state no Democrat had carried since the 1996 presidential election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Newman decided to stop by a phone bank near his home to help out. “That was my first volunteer work on a campaign. … I had always been interested in politics but had never really done anything about it,” said Newman.
He worked for a few hours that day and, unexpectedly, was offered an internship when a campaign organizer found out he was a college student and available to work for the rest of the summer. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I really just walked in that day thinking that I’d phone bank just to try it out, and I walked out and they were ready to hire me as an intern,” he said.
That chance offer really made Newman eager to get involved: Not only did he work for the Obama campaign the rest of the summer, but he also volunteered several hours a week at his university up until the election.
Other students threw themselves into volunteering from the very beginning of the election cycle. Because her father had been politically involved in her hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, for more than 25 years, Sarah Martin had always wanted to follow in his footsteps. “My dad made us pay attention to politics: The news was always on, we’d be involved in important issues, we were always out on Election Day. That’s never really left me,” she said.
For her, then, it was only natural to lend as much support to the campaign she supported — Obama’s — as possible. She initially volunteered for the Penn for Obama group but ended up spending most of her free time — usually about 17 hours a week — working for the campaign directly at Obama’s Pennsylvania headquarters. Although she sometimes felt burdened by the time commitment of volunteering on top of her schoolwork, she felt that in the end it was worth it to have done everything in her power to elect a candidate she truly believed in.
Although their paths to activism may have varied, these students all wished to affect a similar set of national issues: a slumping economy, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a failing health-care system, among others. Of more local importance to Newman, though, was working to elect a candidate who would address the inequalities in opportunities between America’s inner cities, like Philadelphia, where he attends college, and more affluent parts of the country, like the area of Northern Virginia where he grew up. “When I tutored kids in West Philadelphia, it was frustrating for me because some of these kids were just as talented as me and my peers, but they didn’t have the same opportunities that I had,” he said.
For most of these volunteers, engaging in substantive discussions about these issues with potential voters and convincing them that their candidate’s approach was the right one was perhaps the most rewarding part of volunteering. “I think that’s the best thing that I could ever receive as a volunteer on a campaign — the fact that someone says I voted for a candidate because you told me about him or because you gave me more information on him or you pursued me and made me at least look at information about him. And I’ve seen that on every campaign I’ve worked on,” said Mike Stratton, who was co-president of Penn for Obama. “You get people interested and you get a few votes in the process.”
Yet swaying undecided voters was only part of these student activists’ volunteering efforts; they also worked to persuade eligible voters to show up at the polls. “That’s in the end what we wanted,” said Stratton. “Whether you voted for McCain or Obama or in the primary Hillary [Clinton] or Obama, the key is that you voted — that you participated, that you showed your civic duty, and that you used your vote to help change America.”
Many nonpartisan groups have also played an important role in convincing Americans to exercise their right to vote. Some of them, such as Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself, target a national audience by using television, public service announcements, and celebrities to encourage voters — especially young ones — to get involved. Most also use the growing influence of Web sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect with potential voters.
Other groups exist at a local level and use a more individualized approach to encourage a large turnout. One such group is the University of Pennsylvania’s nonpartisan Penn Leads the Vote, which was founded before the 2004 presidential election and is run entirely by Penn students. The organization, according to its president Annassa Corley, used a massive data-driven campaign for the 2008 election to register students at Penn’s Philadelphia campus. Campaign volunteers identified unregistered voters or voters registered out of state, guided them through the registration process, and then helped them locate their polling location — usually just a few blocks away from where they lived at school — so that they had no excuse to miss out on Election Day. “You’re really empowering people to take that first step and vote. We don’t really care who they vote for, but we do care that they are able to represent themselves,” said Corley.
The combined efforts of all these groups were a clear success. The on-campus voter turnout rate at Penn for the 2008 election was 89.6 percent, according to an estimate by Penn Leads the Vote — a rate that beat the national average by nearly 30 percentage points. “In recent history, there’s been a tendency to ignore youth, and I think that at this university in the past couple of years we have really turned that around and shown it is possible to engage youth,” said Corley.
To be sure, most student volunteers came away from the 2008 election with a much greater appreciation of their generation’s ability to change their country’s political landscape. Although they were barely of legal voting age, these students registered thousands of people to vote, worked dozens of hours a week in campaign headquarters, and spoke at major campaign events. And, on the whole, their efforts were successful: At a national level, young people turned out to vote in numbers not seen in 40 years and were one of the deciding demographics in the election.
For Sarah Martin, that victory is both a reward for the work she put in and an incentive to continue volunteering in the future: “Youth as a whole has been known to be a bit short-sighted sometimes — maybe not fully developed in our understanding of our community — but if we did it at this election we can do it in the future even more so.”
Sam Barrett is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania from Albany, New York. He has been a student of international politics and an avid traveler for many years, and he also enjoys writing and music. He hopes to someday work for a major international organization or think tank.
