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What Actually Makes Young People Vote? Not Celebrities

By Matt Zeitlin - Jul 30th, 2008 at 8:51 am

The American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz wrote a fun post reporting on the launch of the Hip Hop Caucus’ voter registration and get out the vote drive. It was apparently a tad more festive than your average community organization rally–it featured a performance by T.I., who, incidentally, is legally prohibited from voting. But Fernholz is probably right to be ambivalent about the effect of such efforts. Vote or Die, the most high profile voter registration drive aimed at youth, was “more about promoting artists and corporate sponsors than civic education.” And even if Hip Hop Caucus is more civically minded than previous youth GOTV efforts, it probably still won’t work.

That’s because there’s really only one effective way to get people to the polls: by having people they know and trust physically go their homes and ask them to vote. Also in the Prospect, Harold Meyerson has a review of Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout, a book authored by two Yale political scientists, which summarizes the results of hundreds of controlled experiments to test different methods for boosting turnout. He writes:

What Green and Gerber have found, in brief, is that the personal touch matters. “Door-to-door canvassing by friends and neighbors is the gold-standard mobilization tactic,” they write. It’s the contact itself that’s the key: the kind of message that the canvassers delivered–whether they handed voters a position paper or a potholder–in itself had no effect on turnout rates. Phone banks staffed by genuinely enthusiastic and chatty volunteers worked as well. In test after test, however, a series of mailings to voters, or recorded phone calls from notables, had no measurable effect on voter turnout.

Not surprisingly, this basic conclusion–personal canvassing by people the voter knows is the best way to get out the vote–strongly applies to youth voters. I wrote about this a month or two ago, but to reprise, Michael Connery has done great research on what actually gets the youth vote. And, unsurprisingly, it’s not celebrities that motivate young people to vote, but “real, peer to peer field work.” This is not to bash free T.I. concerts. I really think there are ought to be as many possible, but don’t expect them to do anything significant as far as youth voting goes.

Tags: activism, music, politics, TI, youth vote