CAMPAIGN 2008: TARGETING YOUNG VOTERS

Friday March 9, 2007
Ballroom
Sheraton Commander Hotel
16 Garden Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts

BEFORE: JEANNE SHAHEEN
Director
Institute of Politics
Kennedy School of Government

P R O C E E D I N G S

(10:02 a.m.)

MS. SHAHEEN: My name is Jeanne Shaheen, I'm the Director of the Institute of Politics and we are the organization that's sponsoring today's conference. We are very excited to have all of you here to talk about a topic that I know everyone in this room is excited about and we've been working for years to get people to pay attention to. And if you haven't seen it, I would encourage you to take a look at the National Journal article that came out this week, it's about the youth voter and engaging young people in politics and public service, it's a terrific piece and we are very excited at the timing of it.

We at the Institute of Politics are particularly interested in this issue because that's our mission. The Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School at Harvard was established in 1966 as a memorial to President John Kennedy and our mission is to engage young people in politics and public service. So we have been looking at this issue of how do we encourage young people to participate in the political process for a long time and we will hear today some of the work that has gone on over the years.

Today we are particularly excited to share with you the findings of a survey, I think an unprecedented survey, we are not aware that anyone has done this kind of a survey before, during the `06 midterm elections, looking at the top targeted campaigns in the country and what they were doing to outreach to young voters. So our first panel this morning is going to talk about that and I will turn the floor over to them shortly.

I can also tell you, on a very personal level, having been the Governor of New Hampshire and having a major outreach effort to young voters, that I understand the difference that young people make in elections and what we are going to hear today I think is more evidence that that's the case. I hope you'll take away with you several things at the end of the day. First, we want to continue to try and set the record straight on what happened in the last two elections. What we heard after the `04 election was that young voters hadn't turned out and what we know now is that in fact they did turn out.

Second, we want to highlight some of the work on the interesting campaigns that happened in `06 and what they did, some of the emerging tactics on how they targeted young people. Hopefully they will give you some idea not just of what worked in `06 and `04 but what we think the new strategies are going to be for `08 and what a difference they can make as we look at the presidential election coming up.

We think it's going to be that combination of new technology and the traditional strategies of a campaign message, fund raising, candidate time, that it's that combination that really works in terms of targeting the youth vote. We also want to send a message to the entire political world that they ignore young people at their own peril.

So we are excited this morning to have the panel talking about the results of our `06 survey and we are going to start this morning with that. To moderate the first panel is John Della Volpe, John has been doing survey research work for 15 years. More importantly, from the Institute of Politic's perspective, he has been working with us since 2000 and he has completed 12 surveys during that time. He is currently the Director of Polling for the Institute of Politics and he is going to be hosting the first panel today.

John?

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Thank you very much, Governor, and thank you everybody for coming all the way to Cambridge to participate in our forum today.

Before I start, we have a tradition at the IOP that folks spend a second or two to introduce themselves, and tell people where they are from and what their affiliation is, so why don't we take it in that style. To my left?

MR. KING: My name is David King, I'm on the faculty at the Kennedy School, I've been, for 15 years, been affiliated with the Institute of Politics, all of that time I'm the Research Director at the Institute of Politics. And I'm from the great State of Wisconsin so I'm happy about the warm weather here, it's very nice.

(Laughter)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Welcome, all, to Cambridge.

MS. YAKATAN: Hi. I'm Nicole Yakatan, I run my own small firm that does mostly qualitative research, so basically I do focus groups and one on one interviews and I was the one who interviewed all the campaign managers in the study.

MR. ANDERSON: I'm Max Anderson, I'm a student at the Kennedy School and the Business School. I was reading the transcript of the interviews Nicole conducted and this is actually the earliest I've been awake on a Friday morning since I've become a student again.

(Laughter)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Great job.

(Laughter)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: So, as the Governor said, my name is John Della Volpe, I'm the Director of Polling here. And before we get into the tactics and strategies of the `06 campaign, what we learned and the results of the IDI Institute, I just want to set the table a little bit and put the morning into some sort of perspective, based on some of the key findings and the history of the survey, as the Governor said, was started in the Winter of 2000.

Carl Cannon, who I think is in the room, from the National Journal wrote that terrific cover story that is out today, there is Carl back there, where he spent several pages walking through the history of it (the IOP survey)and I think it's important for me note that again. This, from the very, very beginning, was an idea that came from young voters, that came from students. Back in January of 2000, I got a phone call from Cathy McLaughlin, the Executive Director of the IOP, who had a couple of conversations with two undergrads, two sophomores, named Erin Ashwell and Trevor Dryer.

And like many students at the time, they were involved deeply in community service and as they looked around campus and looked back over Christmas break, they noticed that lots of their friends, most of their friends, were not connected in any way with politics, and they had some hypotheses and some theories and they went to the IOP, like many students do to participate in other kinds of study groups and discussions, and they said what can we do here at the IOP to help kind of foster some discussion.

And understanding the kind of the chasm between community service and political service, they thought the idea of a survey sounded good, but I think before the IOP committed several thousand dollars in doing that, they reached out to me who had a small polling firm and we decided to partner in that way and that's been the program ever since. It starts every single semester with a group of students, about 12 students or so, and I lead them, along with Professor King and several members of the IOP staff, into a process where we think about questions, think about hypotheses.

Sometimes we do some focus groups but by the end of that semester, by the middle of the semester, we create a survey, we field that survey, and then we work as a group to analyze it and then publish it twice a semester,really with a focus on that disconnect between politics and public service. That was the original theory but that theory kind of changed quite dramatically after September 11th where we went back into the field and the second time we found that there was very little disconnect anymore, that all of a sudden politics became very, very relevant in people's lives, and we began a second course of study after September 11th.

We expanded the survey again in 2006, in this past fall, where we now conduct 1,200 interviews on college campuses and 1,200 interviews of 18 to 24 year olds who are not in college. Some of those interviews include college graduates, some include grad school, but many of them also include folks who have never attended college in any way. We also made the decision, which we thought about long and hard and we tested, to go 100 percent online in the fall, we partnered with a company called Harris Interactive. And I still do a little bit of polling work in campaigns and it's incredibly important, there will be lots of messages to take out of this but one of the most important messages is it's almost impossible to conduct polls of young people over the telephone today.

At least half of all young people under the age of 24 do not have access to a land line, so it's impossible to talk to them with traditional RDD or voter file kinds of surveys. The only way to truly get a picture representing what this young, of what young voters think and believe about politics is to conduct surveys online. So we made that decision in the Fall of 2006 to partner with Harris Interactive and every semester going forward we'll talk to 2,400 young voters.

I just want to touch upon four of the major highlights over the past seven years and 12 surveys. One is that the survey predicted a spike in turnout both in 2004 and in the 2006 elections. We won't have the final data until probably late Spring or Summer of 2007, but we believe that the 2004 and 2006 elections were historic in the sense that the spike in voter turnout was as high as we've seen since `72 and 2004 and among the highest in the last 30 years in the 2006 election.

Another highlight of the survey is the dramatic shifts in attitude towards the political process pre and post 9/11. Just a couple of quick examples. When we started conducting focus groups back during the 2000 cycle, we conducted focus groups across the country for another client interested in young voters and asked who are you going to vote for? And it wasn't uncommon for folks to say it doesn't matter, it's just some old white guy, it doesn't matter who I vote for, they are all the same, why should I participate? Why should I be involved? It's not relevant, you know. And I said, well, you are involved in community service and I know that you believe in helping others, and what's the disconnect?

They said, well, they never saw any tangible results, that they felt that politicians were involved for selfish reasons. They weren't motivated for the common good and they couldn't see the political solutions making any sort of direct impact, as compared to community service, where they worked with somebody in the homeless shelter or somebody helping somebody, mentoring, they could see the results that that sort of community service could have and they couldn't see that connectedness with politics. Everything changed on September 11th where they could see directly the impact of policy.

A third story that I don't think has been told is the importance of religion, not only in the lives of young people but in the way they view politics. A full 25 percent of young people, their ideology is driven pretty heavily by religion and we can talk about this more throughout the day but we uncovered the slice of the electorate, which we called religious centrist, who were really kind of the swing vote, I believe, both among young people but also among the nation as a whole.

Just to give you just a few thoughts about the religious center, they are more likely to be African American and Hispanic and they are conservative on some social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage and gay rights, though liberal on other issues, and they really are the swing demographic. When we polled them prior to the 2004 election, they were split evenly between John Kerry and George Bush and when we tested some hypothetical matchups last year, they were split almost evenly at that time between McCain and Hillary, although Hillary had a little bit of an advantage, but really that key swing demographic. To really reach out, each of your campaigns, to really reach out and capture that, you really need to understand the role in which religion plays both in their lives and the way that young people think about politics.

The fourth and final highlight, survey highlight, that I'll mention right now is the dramatic difference in the way in which young people think about foreign policy relative to their older counterparts, incredibly, incredibly important. As you'll see in this graph here over my right shoulder, we ask a question that the New York Times has asked a number of times since September 11th. That question is, which of the following statements comes closest to your own views points? Number one, the U.S. should take the lead in solving international crises and conflicts; or the U.S. should let other countries in the United Nations take the lead in solving international crises and conflicts? The U.S. should take the lead or the U.N. should take the lead with other countries?

The bar on the righthand side, the 31/59, that's what Americans, the general population of America, believes as of July of 2006, 31 percent of Americans think the U.N. should take the lead and 59 percent of Americans think the U.S. should take the lead. You ask that same question among 18 to 24 year olds in college and you see dramatic differences. By a margin of three to one, young Americans, young voters, believe that the U.N. and other countries, and not the U.S., ought to take the lead in solving international crises and conflicts. An incredibly important view into the lives and the world view in which young people think about politics and public service in the world as a whole, incredibly important.

And we've asked this question two times over, we asked this question two or three times over the past couple of years and that number hasn't changed. We'll ask it again this springtime and, for the first time, we'll include some non-college students as well, but a dramatic, dramatic difference. So I just wanted to highlight some of those, as tablesetters, some of the key differences in highlights in our surveys over the past seven years.

I would like to introduce Professor King, David King, who is going to walk us through some of the highlights of the `04 and `06 elections.

MR. KING: Thank you, John.

And we will bounce around fairly quickly, I think, down the table, come back here and then make sure that we get to questions, because I know you have many. But I want to acknowledge a, well, first, most of you who are in this room already believe that the youth vote matters, that the youth vote has turned out, but it's also important to recognize that there were good, rational reasons why campaigns, as opposed to political parties, campaigns were not investing in trying to mobilize, reach and mobilize young voters, they were hard to find.

It's also important to realize that the youth vote is really all about new voters. People who are 18 years old and may have voted in 2004, they are going to be four years older in 2008. My 14 year old in 2004 is going to be 18 and ready to vote in 2008, so the youth vote is not, it's not the same folks, every year it turns over and over.

Candidates are pretty rational about how they target their dollars. David Nickerson's research found, in the wake of 2000, that for every one dollar it cost to reach and mobilize somebody over the age of 64 it cost three dollars to reach and mobilize somebody under the age of 24 and younger.

So if you have scarce resources, why in the world would you invest in the youth vote? Campaigns are not in the business of promoting the long-term viability of democracy, that's up to other parts of our political system. Four pillars of political socialization include families, schools, churches or religious communities and friends. And at least two of these pillars have really broken down over the last few years. Going into the election in 2004, a majority of America's young people, up until the age of 18, America's children, a majority of America's children lived in homes in which no parent present in that home had ever voted, so the family transfer of this habit of voting was breaking down.

Schools weren't teaching about civics in the same way that they used because of two waves, first, after Vietnam, it was seen as a form of propaganda. Second, with testing in the 1980s and the 1990s, it was squeezed out. So we don't teach about civics, we don't teach about voting, that leaves churches, and communities and friends. There were lots of reasons to expect, coming after 2000, that people wouldn't vote. In fact if you look at the off-year election in 2002, just looking at the 18 year olds, just one out of ten actually voted the first time that they were able to vote, nine out of ten first time eligible voters, right after 9/11, didn't vote. So the expectation was they weren't going to turn out in 2004 as well.

Well you know the story the Associated Press ran with bogus data coming from exit polls saying that, well, the proportion of the electorate wasn't the same. The exit poll data was based on turnout models from 2000, so they also were rational about where they will deploy their resources. And they didn't have a single exit poll done on or near a college campus so if there is an increase in turnout, you are not going to see it because you are not looking there. And people expected the youth to be slackers, once again.

What happened in 2004? Among college age young people, the highest voter turnout since the voting age was dropped in 1971, the first time they were able to vote in a presidential election in 1972, the highest turnout, the second highest turnout since 1972 among 18 to 24 demographic, so they showed up. What were we expecting in 2006?

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Can I make one point there, David?

MR. KING: Yeah.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: This is a point I've mentioned about 1,000 times but I think I need to mention it 10,000 times because a few people still see it as just a subhead. In 2004, there were literally more votes cast among young people under 30 than seniors over 65, the first demographic group that most every campaign targets, and we'll go through some of that data of your campaigns targeting them too. But by more, by about a million, there were more votes cast between voters between the ages of 18 and 29 than over 65, so that was a demographic that really drove the increase in turnout between 2000 and `04.

MR. KING: Thank you, John.

And I want to point out that this data is from the current populations surveys. The CPS data don't come out until the summer following an election so, oftentimes, the media cycle is way beyond the stories, their initial reaction is wrong. But take a look at differences in turnout based on the age of the voters, the yellow line on the bottom is turnout in 2000. This is a smooth trend line the National Journal article has per age group, a smooth trend line in 2000 and 2004. Overwhelmingly the increase in turnout from 2000 and 2004 came from those who were under the age of 30, overwhelmingly.

Now this changes the calculus of trying to reach young voters, they are much easier, they are much more likely actually to vote, and with new technologies, they are easier to reach. So what happened in 2006? Well we'll go through that in a moment but we were poised, going into 2006, to try and understand what campaigns were doing, whether or not they knew that the youth vote might be important, what they were doing to try and reach them and then what actually worked, that's what we'll get to in a moment. Nicole Yakatan did all of these interviews, the cauliflower ear.

MS. YAKATAN: Thank you, David.

All right, so, basically what we did was, in September, we took the National Journal list of the most competitive races, there were 46 competitive races identified, pretty evenly split between senate, house and gubernatorial races, and we sent all those campaigns letters explaining the project. They got a little swag with their letter, they got a hat. But to try to get them interested in the project, we got the party chairs a little bit involved, we used personal contacts where we could, everything that we could do was necessary because it's very hard to get into these campaigns.

We specifically chose to conduct these interviews during the heat of the campaign, September to November, when there is not a lot of time, they don't have a lot of time to spend 15 minutes on the phone with me, so everything we could do to get into the door we tried. Basically had to be very persistent, call lots of times, and you can't say it enough, how important it is to be nice to the receptionist or the assistant, very, very key and something to remember all the time because if you can make friends with them, they are going to do everything they can to get you that 15 minutes on the phone.

We waited on races with competitive primaries so we didn't call those at first. Once the primary season was done, we started in earnest, calling everybody. And in retrospect, I think it was a, I was doubtful at the time but I think it was a really good idea to choose to make those calls during the heat of the campaign. I did a few interviews after the election because some people just couldn't find time, couldn't do it, didn't want to do it, there were just a few after the election. But during the heat of the campaigns, you got really honest answers about making those decisions with the dollars, with the resources, with the time.

And I think we got a better sense of where the youth vote was in terms of in the minds of these campaign managers of how top of mind was it? How much are they thinking about youth voters? Are they specifically targeting them or is it a total afterthought? And it was very interesting to hear some of the things that they were willing to talk about. As I said, most of them we called prior to the election but there were a couple that we waited until after to call, including at least one race that wasn't decided until several weeks later. But mostly we called campaign managers, we talked to a few deputies and a few field directors but for the most part these were campaign managers that we spoke to.

The interviews ran between 15 minutes and 45 minutes, probably an average of 30 minutes, and the interview guide, which I'm going to talk about a little bit, was a very dynamic document. We had the questions there but we didn't always ask them in the same order, we made sure we did follow ups when something interesting was mentioned, something new, something different, people using technology in a certain way, so we skipped around a lot. I emphasized to everyone that I spoke to that the interviews were confidential and anonymous so when we report, we are not going to specifically say, oh, campaign manager x said this, unless, you know, there is someone with us today willing to talk about their actions during the campaign, because we wanted them to be honest.

I mean, for some of them, these were kind of campaign secrets, they are telling us where they are focusing their dollars, where they are focusing their resources, how much they are letting the candidate talk to young people or how much the candidate wants to talk to young people. Sometimes the candidates wanted to be out there every day on a different college campus and other times it was a struggle to get them there. So those were the kinds of things that, you know, campaign managers aren't always willing to share because they don't know where this is going to end up, so we were very firm that this was all going to be confidential and anonymous when it was reported.

So let me talk a little bit about the interview guide, the questions that we asked. We started out with a little bit of information about their knowledge about the demographics of their electorate and how important a role they expected certain groups to play in their campaign, so obviously they are speculating at this point but they kind of have an idea of where they are focusing their resources, how important a role did they feel seniors were, and then young voters, and I let them define young voters. For the most part, campaign managers felt that it was voters under 30, sometimes it's voters under 25, but for the most part, I think we saw a lot of them thinking about young as under 30.

College students, union members, minorities and women. And I think Max is going to talk about this a little bit more but we found that often they would say seniors are very important, and it goes back to, as David was saying, you know, we know where they are, we know they vote, so they are very important to us. Young voters? Somewhat important was the answer we usually got and as we went down the list, it would often be that young voters were the only ones that were in the somewhat category and everyone else was in the very category, so that was very interesting.

We didn't use it as a quiz or try to put anybody on the spot but we asked what percentage of the likely electorate are young voters and what percentage are seniors? Well very few campaign managers had this knowledge top of mind, and some of them would say hang on, let me look at my poll, and they would be flipping through their poll trying to find the numbers and they found that they really couldn't give that number to me because in their poll even it doesn't show up as big enough to give me a number, so that was very interesting.

It's really not something that campaign managers are thinking about and I think it goes back to what David was saying, that there is idea that it's not worth it for me to target young voters, I'm not convinced of the efficacy of going after these people, so they don't spend their resources there. And I heard that over and over again, you know, I'm not convinced, they have low turnout, there is no vote history. Well of course there is no vote history because they haven't voted but maybe once or twice. I'm not convinced of the pay off, they are not worth the money to reach, they are too transient.

So it seems like if the numbers hold true and young voters are voting as a greater proportion of the electorate than ever before, campaign managers and pollsters for that matter are going to have to start trying to figure out how to find those young people, and figure out what they are thinking and persuade them. So it is a whole new world even for political folks across the board because I don't think pollsters are really looking at that too much right now either.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Some of us are.

(Laugher)

MS. YAKATAN: But I mean you hear these campaign managers looking through their polls trying to find the number for under 30 and it's too small, it's not, they haven't--

MR. DELLA VOLPE: When we get one percent of 400, it's impossible to weight that up to seven percent because you can't weight 1 percent, there is not enough to be weighted there, so it's just a vacuum.

MS. YAKATAN: So pollsters are going to have to find young voters as well.

We talked a little bit about message, we asked do you have policy proposals or issue papers that are directed to young people, have you talked about issues any differently when you are talking to young people? And I saw a clear difference. Some campaigns would say, oh, yeah, young people care about the economy, they care about minimum wage, they care about student aid and education, and other campaigns, even though they mean the same thing, would say, oh, the issues are no different, it's hard to differentiate, you know, you can't talk any differently to young people.

Basically the issues are the same but they were writing off young people, they were saying, oh, we haven't thought about it, it was a euphemism for I really haven't thought about how young people think about issues differently or I haven't thought about I need to talk about. Clearly they do talk about issues differently when they talk to an audience of young people but it wasn't really top of mind, it wasn't a strategy that we've decided upon. So I thought that was very interesting.

A couple of interesting things that I heard from campaign managers also on the positive side, in terms of young people, were that they thought it was very important to talk about change and a new direction, and it didn't matter whether they were Democrats or Republicans, that they felt like that was important when you talk to young people, to talk about change and new direction, and also to be optimistic. I particularly remember one campaign manager saying, you know, with seniors you kind of operate more on the fear side, but with young people you need to be optimistic when you are talking about the future. So that was very interesting.

In terms of programs, events, budget, we asked about do you have any specific programs designed for the younger demographic, you know, what are you doing to reach them? Events, rallies, campus programs, GOTV, voter registration drives, young people, young professionals fund raising events. And we also asked about how much of the budget they are spending to target young people. We don't cut the numbers that way, I could never tell you how many, how much, but it's not very much. They couldn't give me a specific number, but I know we are not spending very much to reach young people because they had basically written them off. Most campaigns didn't have a strategy to get to young people, at least not a paid strategy.

Several of them did have strategies in terms of staff, which was very important and I think Max is going to talk about this more in a moment, but having young staff and lots of interns seems to be very important to reaching young people and I was struck by some campaigns telling me, oh, intern programs? We don't really have an intern program or maybe we had five interns in the summer, and other campaigns saying, oh, we had fifty, a hundred, I couldn't keep track of how many young people were in and out of here, and that was really important.

Also utilization of the summer interns over into the fall. Instead of just letting them go back to whatever they were doing in the fall, some campaigns had a specific way to keep those people involved, keep them talking to their friends, keep them sending e-mails. I remember one campaign manager telling me, oh, yeah, my daily press list, they come from an intern six states away who was back at college but still working for the campaign electronically.

We asked them about having a dedicated student or youth coordinator and this was very interesting because rarely did campaigns have someone whose sole portfolio it was to deal with students, deal with youth and organize them. It was usually like, oh, well, they are also a field coordinator for this geographic area and because they are young, we let them have that portfolio as well. But there were a few that had paid people but, for the most part, this is an afterthought, it's sort of like, well, you handle the college campus because we don't really have anybody who is doing that. Once in a while there would be a campaign who had a really great organizer on campus and that person would become a paid staff member. Because they were so good at organizing on campus, they would become the person that organized on all the campuses throughout the state or throughout the district.

We asked about outreach, how much time are candidates spending with, candidates spending with young people? How much time are surrogates in front of young people? And again, Max will talk about this a little more, how important that was. But I consistently heard from people that campaigns needed to be social, they needed to be fun, and they emphasized tailgates, and parties and things like that, and I think that was across the board, people are starting to realize that that's important, that it's a movement, it's not just making sure they vote at the end of the day, but to get them involved and really care about it and really feel like it's part of their social network.

And then finally, the other sort of key area that we talked about was technology and tools that they are using. Okay, well, I'll just real quickly say that I feel a lot of these things are, they are new communications and I think the effective campaigns saw these tools as just a new way to communicate. We all know that we are going in that direction, we are going to use the Web more, we are going to use e-mail more, it's more and more important, and it just so happens that this is the most appealing to young people. So almost as an accident, young people are being drawn into these campaigns, as campaigns are getting more technology savvy.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: And Max, what would be great for you now is to focus on some of the new techniques, so we'll touch upon this and we are going to spend the rest of the afternoon talking in more detail. But I'm particularly interested in those which did spend their time focusing on young people, how and why they did it.

MR. ANDERSON: Great. And I know we want to give you time for questions so I'll go a little more quickly through this than I would otherwise.

The slide up there points to Nicole's point that a lot of the managers didn't know what percentage of the electorate the youth vote was, they didn't rate young voters as very important as opposed to other groups. Innovative strategies, and I won't get to all of them, we can cover some of these over questions. Text messaging, and this is something that some of the campaigns did but very few, not very many at all, but I think it will be of emerging importance in the coming years.

Just a quick show of hands, how many of the students here, graduate students or undergrads, how many of you have a land line? Would you raise your hand? Okay, and how many are here that do no have a land line? Okay, this proves the point. The young voters are hard to reach because you can't get their land line and a lot of campaigns have used text messaging in terms of communicating within the staff, but very few, according to our interviews, were actually using text messaging to reach out to voters.

Some of the most innovative ones were doing just that though, they'd get voters to text in a certain number of, say, jobs, or something, as the quote says, and then throughout the rest of the campaign they could get messages to them on that issue. Some of the campaigns feared that this might be intrusive to people, they didn't want to get text messages on their phone, especially if there was a charge, but others weren't afraid of that. They went in and they got programs where you could register, you could request registration information for voting, you could donate up to $10 to the campaign via your cell phone.

Maybe this should be more about cell than just text, that a campaign here in Boston, the Deval Patrick for Governor campaign, they would have a rally and have 6,000 people at the rally do a cell phone bank at the rally, get people to use their phones at the moment and call 100,000 people at once. Let's move on, we can go more in depth with these later.

Innovative strategy number two, get hip, hot--

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Like Max.

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, like me.

(Laughter)

MR. ANDERSON: This may sound kind of silly but just think about when Bill Clinton went on "Arsenio Hall" and played the saxophone or when he was on MTV, this was, it seems standard today but it was pretty revolutionary back them. At that time, the most popular radio format in America was country music, that's changed, hip-hop is far and away the most popular format, especially with young people, and it's not just a way to reach minorities, although it is almost a proxy for that. And Russell Simmons ran a series of hip-hop summits where he would invite politicians to come and speak, to reach out to the youth minority. And some candidates do that very effectively. I think that the question there is can you do it with some sort of authenticity and not pretending to be something you are not? We can talk more about that.

Let's go to number three.

Go back to school, two points here, one, the importance of actually speaking on college campuses. The campaign, Brown's campaign in Ohio actually did a five day tour of the major campuses in Ohio speaking to the students and it had a couple of effects. One, it got a lot of volunteers for the campaign; two, they did it right when early voting started so it was an immediate get everyone charged up and then send them right out to vote. And thirdly, and this is something that they didn't quite anticipate, it just energized the internal staff, especially the candidate. They were getting tired but they went in and had thousands of screaming college students and it kind of pumps you up a little bit.

The second part, location-based volunteer recruitment. A couple of the campaigns that we talked with actually located their offices near college campuses so students could walk over or a very short drive to volunteer, that made an exponential difference in the ease with which they were able to attract volunteers to come help send e-mails or lick envelopes.

Video is worth a thousand words and this almost doesn't need to be covered, I'll just say one or two brief points. Up there you can upload ads so you don't have to pay for the ad time, you can film your own speeches and immediately post them out. Deval Patrick would send that to the blogosphere so it would get even wider distribution than his own Website.

You can catch your opponents mistakes, makaka-gate or the Memphis meltdown. You can have your supporters film their own advertisements for you. This was done in Arkansas and California, a number of campaigns where they actually had contests for a supporter of you to create ads for your campaign. And I think Phil Angelides's campaign in California was really great at this because they actually give the winner a chance to see their ad on the ad space during "The Daily Show" on the day before the campaign. So there was big payoff for them and they got a lot of people submitting their ads, and you can still watch them on YouTube, if you are interested.

Last, e-mails with ads. Some campaigns had 100,000 people on their e-mail list, for a statewide campaign, and they were able to blast out a video to them all at once. Oftentimes those were just shared, lots of those campaigns, e-mail this to 100,000 means 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 people are sort of--

MR. DELLA VOLPE: There is a viral effect.

MR. ANDERSON: --saying in fact this is funny, you should check this out.

Christy Mihos had an ad here in Massachusetts where he was asking how the Big Dig got so far over budget and, you know, he had cartoons of people with their heads up their --. And it got a lot of play, just virally.

(Laughter)

MR. ANDERSON: We could talk about some of the best practices with that. Number five, network, network, network. Both MySpace and Facebook are among the top five or ten most popular sites in the United States.

Another quick show of hands. If you are under 25, raise your hand if you are on either Facebook of MySpace, if you have an account? Okay, put it down. Raise your hand if you don't. Okay.

If you are over 25, raise your hand if you have an account on Facebook or MySpace? Interesting. Raise your hand if you don't. Okay. This is really scientific, John is going to take the results here.

(Laughter)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Could you raise your hands again for the second part?

(Laughter)

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, exactly.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: I missed that.

MR. ANDERSON: I think what we'll see between 2006 and 2008 is that the people over 25 who have accounts is going to continue to grow but, as you see, everybody under 25 has it. And what we saw I think from the campaign interviews, there are two types of campaigns in terms of how they used Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, these other social networking sites. One campaign are those who did it because they felt like they had to, the media said, oh, you've got to get on Facebook.

Facebook, you may or may not be aware, set up online profiles for every single major candidate in 2006, statewide races and also house races and some campaigns were unaware that they had an account. Actually, it's interesting, Mitt Romney was unaware, apparently until a couple of weeks ago, that he had a Facebook account.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Actually, Max, on that note, we did an analysis of MySpace today for the presidential campaigns and the Barak Obama campaign it has 59,000 MySpace friends. Hillary Clinton has about 30,000 MySpace friends. Mitt Romney, the top tier Republican candidate, any idea how many friends he has on MySpace? Zero? No, he has 1,967. The Democrats have tens of thousands, Romney has 1,900 and Giuliani and McCain have less than 1,000, less than 1,000, they are not even focused on it.

MR. ANDERSON: So you have these campaigns that are unaware, where they consciously chose not to use it because they heard horror stories. Claire McCaskill in Missouri ran into some trouble because some of her volunteers posted a video on MySpace, I think taking down some signs from her opponents and campaigns heard about that and said, hey, I don't want to touch it, it's toxic.

And then the third type of campaign who used it poorly are those who did it as a, I heard one campaign who said they did it as a charade, just to say that we did it. His opponent actually had two people on staff paid full time managing Facebook and MySpace, he ended up winning. I'm not saying there is a direct correlation but that's the second type of campaign, they take it very seriously.

Bill Ritter for Governor in Colorado ran almost their entire college outreach through Facebook, they had Facebook captains on each campus that were reaching out to their friends and networking that way.

I'll leave from there, I think there is a lot of good stuff to talk about with networking. An emerging trend with all this technology, and really you could even say beyond the technological aspect, is open source campaigning. By open source meaning, Microsoft creates Windows and every couple of years they make you buy, you know, XP or Vista, and they pay a series, there are a team of programmers to create the program and then we buy it. The other operating system, another model, is the Linux or Unix operating system where the users who actually use it create and program the software themselves. They are not paid for it, it's voluntary, but the idea is that a million heads are better than one.

And I think we began to see the beginnings of an open source movement in political campaigns. Deval Patrick, again, here in Massachusetts, said we want you to be your own campaign manager to his volunteers. And I think, if you go down the list of everything from websites to online video text messaging, social networking, there is kind of a traditional way to use these tools and then there is more of an open source way, open source meaning distribute out power, give up your control and let people have the autonomy to set up their own fund raising sites for you and set up their own pro candidate sites for you, to create their own videos, to create their own social networks for you, and I think this will grow in importance in 2008.

I think we'll look back and we'll see 2006 was kind of the beginnings of it but it really wasn't the year of open source, but 2008 will be. And just a quick preview of some of the candidate Websites, John McCain has a McCainSpace, kind of like the MySpace, for his campaign. Barak Obama is mybarakobama.com where you can create your own profile, you can plan events, raise money, network with your friends. Hillary has a similar thing. John Edwards not only has his only kind of privately branded social networking things but then he has more than nine or ten other, links to other sites like Facebook, like MySpace, like Gather where, anywhere you want to be, you can network in with the John Edwards community. As of I think, well, last night, Barak Obama had more than 300,000 friends on Facebook and--

MR. DELLA VOLPE: He started his Facebook site when, Max?

MR. ANDERSON: What's that?

MR. DELLA VOLPE: When did he start, you know--

MR. ANDERSON: Oh, I see. It was less than, it was about two months ago.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Oh, two months ago.

MR. ANDERSON: Something like that. They have a campaign called One Million Strong and they believe they are going to go way beyond one million friends via Facebook.

Let me leave it there. And I'll leave you with one other question that you can think about, what are the things that we didn't see at all in 2006 or hardly at all and what are the things that we saw in 2006 that won't be here in 2008? For instance, meetup.com - huge in 2004 for Dean but we didn't hear anybody talk about it in 2006. Will there be things like that in 2008?

And the thing we didn't see hardly at all in 2006 is Second Life. I'm not sure if you are familiar with that but it's an online virtual world where, actually Mark Warner did do a press conference on Second Life, Dell has done press conferences on Second Life. It's a virtual world, you have a little character, you can walk around and will that be something that's going to be used by politicians.

So I'll leave it to your discussion.

MR. KING: I want to talk a little bit about what seemed to have worked. So we have interviews in 59 campaigns, in 17 of these campaigns we have both sides, access to their information, and if you look at these various buckets that Nicole and that Max have described, demographic knowledge, program events and funding, messaging, use of technology, staff and intern outreach, Max is focused on the use of technology, and that is important in order to get that cost ratio down, to be able to reach young people. But when we look at each race what really drove the numbers?

Were you more likely to win if you were using technology? Well, not really. What technology allows you to do is to get in the door, and to bring young people into your campaigns, and also to reach out onto college campuses, and in high schools and so forth. It's really three things that seem to make a big difference, technology to open the door, which is the new way of campaigning. But in the end, you have to be able to look somebody in the eyes and say we need your vote, will you be part of this community? Not necessarily the campaign manager, it can be surrogates, it can be somebody that you recruited through the Internet all through text messaging. But ultimately, you have to look somebody in the face, shake their hands and say please join us.

In terms of actually winning, there are a couple of things that are highly predictive, highly correlative. The average hours per month that candidates spent with young voters. I'm not talking about whether or not you win the youth vote, forget about that, whether or not you win the campaign is a function of how much time you spent with voters. How about staff? Do you have a lot of staff that are young, under the age of 25 or under the age of 30? How many interns do you have?

Now, if you are thinking about these, you might say, well, this is actually all about parties because, you know, the Democrats, they like the young folks so they are going to be on the college campuses a lot more or the Democrats, they have a lot of young interns. Controlling for party, outreach to the youth community and the use of interns and staff that are young. Controlling for party, that's what made the difference in terms of winning in these 59 interviews and 17 paired campaigns.

Now those other things, like messaging, for example, what matters is how you are doing relative to your opponent. So you can have a candidate who doesn't use the technology, doesn't think very much at all about the youth vote, but the opponent who just uses technology a little bit more and thinks about the youth vote a little bit more, they were actually more likely to win. So you don't have to pin it all the way at 100 percent, you just have to do better with the youth vote than your opponent and you were more likely to win.

Now did the youth vote make a difference at a national level? The typical way so far that this has been explored, because the data is not out yet, people are trying desperately to get the data, the typical way is to look at specific precincts and you say, you know, look around the University of Michigan campus and turnout surged around the University of Michigan campus. But you can also find places in Tampa with a whole bunch of really old people and turnout went up there as well.

The right way to do this is not to cherry pick. I don't mean to say anything bad about Tampa, I'm sure my grandparents will live there some day.

(Laughter)

MR. KING: But the right thing is not to cherry pick, but to look at overall levels of turnout and then to compare both the turnout and registration rates in, say, the younger areas or the older areas in some relevant campaign, some relevant period. And it's absolutely the case in 2006, as it was in 2002, the last mid-term, that folks in younger counties are less likely to vote than folks in older counties, but what matters is the relative turnout ratio, where are the increases in voters? Where do you get the biggest bang for your buck if you want to mobilize new voters?

Take a look, for example, in Virginia. Here, this is really neat.

In Virginia we know, from the census, how many young people are in each county. They have an estimate that came out based on July 1, 2005, the median age, and the median age in Williamsburg City, for example, the home of William and Mary College, the median age is 22.3, so half of the population of Williamsburg City is under the age of 22.3, half is older. Harrisonburg City, it's 22.8. Get to a big place like Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, the median age is 28.

There are other counties where the median age is considerably older. Lancaster County, the median age is 50, a lot of Washington, D.C. retirees. And people vote at a higher rate, on average, in that county than they do in the very youngest median age county. The relative turnout ratio from 2003 to 2006, and in Virginia it makes sense to do 2003 because they had, every legislative district had a race that year, the relevant turnout ratio is .538. In other words, for every voter that you had in these ten oldest counties, and I'll give you the data if you want it for every single county, the probability that a younger voter would show up is .538.

In 2006, a dramatic increase in relative turnout ratios in the youngest counties, a dramatic increase. For example, in Williamsburg City, they had a registration increase of 7 percent and a turnout increase of 27 percent. In Charlottesville, where the University of Virginia is, they had a registration increase of 11 percent, a surge in turnout of 38 percent. In Norfolk, which not only has Old Dominion but also has the Navy base, a registration increase of 5 percent, a turnout increase of 25 percent.

When Webb went up against George Allen, there were 4.2 million votes cast, Webb beat Allen by less than 10,000 votes. You have two things combined, an increase in relative turnout ratio in the very youngest areas, relative to the older areas, and an increase in registration. Overwhelmingly, that accounts for Webb's victory over Allen and, as you know, every single vote in the senate matters.

The story is even clearer if we go to Montana. Montana is a very interesting state, it wasn't really on the radar screen, people talked about the so-called Generation Webb and people knew that they were trying to activate younger voters.

Here again turnout from 2002 to 2008 went up, all the votes were lifted but the relative turnout ratios mattered a lot. In 2002, you had .777 probability of a younger voter in these younger counties.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Which means? That means for every hundred voters who are older there were 77 younger ones?

MR. KING: Roughly that.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Roughly that.

MR. KING: That's roughly what it means.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: In `02. In `06, for every hundred there were 82?

MR. KING: Correct. And the registration numbers are dramatically different. They weren't registering new voters in the older counties, those folks were actually dying, registration numbers dropped by four percent in the ten oldest counties, ten most senior counties in Montana, and registration surged by almost eight percent in the youngest areas. Tester beat Senator Burns by 3,500 votes out of 411,000 votes cast. If you look at the turnout around the University of Montana campus in Missoula and if you look at the turnout around Montana State University in Bozeman, that's the whole story, that's the whole story.

Now what techniques did they actually use? Well it was very widely known and public record that Tester cared a little bit more about the youth vote, he wasn't focused on it entirely but he cared a little bit more about it, and Burns didn't mobilize that way at all. So the youth vote mattered.

Here are some of our summaries. Young voters are a major voting block, a key component in election victories. Not enough campaign professionals were aware of this, they didn't understand that there are more votes cast today by Americans under the age of 30 than there are for Americans over the age of 65.

The most successful campaigns in 2006, what drove the wins? The youth vote and you get to the youth vote by blending new technology with grassroots activities, you integrate the campaigns with young people, you cede some control with new media.

We want you to care and we want you to get the message out there, that the calculus has changed. If you want to win, you can't overlook this demographic. It matters to you as campaign professionals. If you are not a campaign professional, it ought to matter to you as a citizen. Voting is a habit, one of the overlooked facts of political science research of voting trends is that the decline in turnout over the last 20 years or 25 years is almost entirely driven by cohort effects, young people not voting and then continuing not to vote. You have to reach the young voters every single election, and that's in the long-term interest of the country and it's in the short-term interest of your candidates.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Thank you.

In addition to conducting lots of surveys, I also do a lot of focus groups and one of the rules I have for focus groups is I want everybody to talk and make this kind of an interactive session. And I really want that to be of the way in which we think about the sessions as they continue on throughout the morning and the afternoon. What we are going to do is, in about 15 minutes, we are going to take a 15 minute break but, between now and then, I just want to open up the floor with some questions, comments, anything at all to talk about some of the things you heard about this morning, for me or for the rest of the panelists here.

I think because we are recording, it will be helpful if you stood up in front of the microphones and just mention your name and where you are from and organization. So we'll just do it from the microphones, if we could.

MS. CALKIN: Hi. I'm Kayla, I'm a senior at Wellesley College.

And my question is I think Facebook and MySpace are excellent tools to obviously connect with our population, but I wonder how you bridge the gap between technology and motivation because I feel like Facebook is a great way to reach these people but I don't think it's a great way to really motivate them to get involved.

MR. DELLA VOLPE: I'm going to take a stab at that, and this is something that I don't want to get lost, something that Governor Shaheen mentioned in her opening remarks, it is technology, people, interns, all those things matter, but it pales in comparison if the candidate and the message isn't strong and motivating in itself. So, ultimately, the motivation has to come from the candidate, the message and the platform that he or she is running, and then it's up to I think the technology as well as other kinds of strategies and tactics to take that message and communicate that in the best way possible.

Certainly, you know, from my perspective, technology is an important element to any campaign, certainly for young people and for a growing number of Americans, but it's not the only tactic. So I think it really depends upon the demographic cohort that you are looking at, but never ever underestimate the importance of the candidate, the message and the persona.

MR. ANDERSON: Also, Chris Kelly from Facebook is here this afternoon and it would be a great question to ask him.

MS. YAKATAN: Can I follow up on it just for a second too? We heard over and over again from campaign managers that relationships still matter and that these are tools to communicate but there still needs to be a relationship, someone still needs to be asking you to do something, it still needs to be coming from someone you know or if the candidate can get out there and interact with people. A couple of the candidates that we spoke to or the campaign managers spoke to have candidates that are kind of like rock stars, you know, they got out there, and they were shaking hands, and they were doing events, and they were at the tailgates and they were getting their fraternity involved, and it was really civil relationship-based campaigns, those were just tools.

MR. BOLGER: My name is Ben Bolger and I'm working on my doctorate at Harvard, but I graduated from Michigan undergrad so I'm happy to see a few fellow Wolverines today.

But my question is, with some of the recommendations of the diffuse media connections and returning some of the power of the campaign manager to a variety of young people, how do you balance that with having a very focused, driven message that might come out of a focus group and say that there are certain key issues that we want to emphasize and others that we perhaps don't, we don't want to alienate other voters. So how do you orchestrate a balance between restoring autonomy to individuals but also really keeping a campaign focused and not letting them get off track?

MR. DELLA VOLPE: I think it's a great question and I think, I like to pass off questions.

(Laughter)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Later on this afternoon, this roundtable discussion--

(Laughter)

MR. DELLA VOLPE: --with the managers would be great.

The reason I want to pass it off is because I don't know that people have it all figured out yet. This is a new thing for all of us and there were those horror stories of some bad things, videos or whatever getting out, and there was a lot of concern from managers about that. I would just say that it seemed like the campaigns who had the greatest youth energy were those that did diffuse the power, that said, hey, we are kind of hands-off, we let our volunteers run it and let it takes its course.

Now the thing is that may have worked for 2006, it may not work as well in 2008 and I think we'll have to see how that plays out. A great question.

MS. GEORGE: Hi. That was an incredible presentation, I'm a big fan of data so that's really, really exciting to see--

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Was that David or data?

(Laughter)

MS. GEORGE: Both actually.

(Laughter)

MS. GEORGE: My name is Lisa George and I graduated from the Kennedy School last year, so I'm also a big fan of Professor King.

But my question is really about the YouTube phenomenon, which is that I know that, you know, there is obviously a way for traction around that stuff, the bad videos, the makaka moments, and there are some candidates that captured the imagination with Christy Mihos's ad, but how do you, how do you really be proactive in getting your YouTube campaign to be viral? And how do you as a candidate be that creative?

When Christy Mihos did that ad, I think part of it was, yeah, that was interesting and really funny, but he was taken a little less seriously by Democratic people, or Republicans in the state, so how do you, where is the line there and how do you capitalize on that?

MR. DELLA VOLPE: Lots of these questions are really (great), I hope you ask them again and I hope they are part of the conversation because you will really hear from some of the folks on the front lines. Just a couple of observations, as we were looking through this data and other reactions to the campaign, there are two kinds of videos oftentimes uploaded on YouTube, you've got the traditional 30 second and 60 second commercials that are up there, but you also have the homemade videos and the videos of the rally taken sometimes by a supporter or sometimes by professional staff.

And oftentimes, by margins of 4, 5, 6 to 1, it's those homemade videos that, or the ones that look homemade are the ones that are viewed most often. The director prior to Governor Shaheen was Secretary Glickman and Secretary Glickman always talked about how young people have this great kind of BS meter and they really look and look for authenticity. So that is such an integral part, it's a constant theme you'll hear, in terms of the way in which young people look for things, they look for things to be authentic for that kind of a relationship and that sort of bond. And I think that is a key driver to anything, any sort of kind of campaign material, especially the things on