How to Mobilize Young Voters
Rock the Vote is a leader developing best practices for mobilizing young voters. If you want to know how to get out the youth vote, we can help.
From traditional campaign tactics - phone calls, canvassing and grassroots outreach – to new tactics – organizing social networks, online advertising, email outreach, and mobile – we’ve got tip on which techniques work to register, engage, and turn out young voters.
Rock the Vote also houses the latest young voter polling, demographic analyses, and turnout figures from recent elections. For more on those subjects, see Who Are Young Voters?
Winning Young Voters Handbook (pdf)
April 2008 - Our premier handbook for campaigns, organizations, and parties interested in mobilizing young voters. This handbook contains information about the demographics and voting habits of young adults and best practices for registering and turning out 18-29 year olds to the polls.
Winning Young Voters: New Media Tactics (pdf)
June 2008 - New media tactics should be a central part of any campaign targeting young voters, but can be confusing for people more familiar with TV advertising, door-knocks, or campaign rallies. “New Media Tactics,” the second in Rock the Vote's series of “Winning Young Voters” handbooks, shows you the basics of how to use new media - email, the Internet, social networks, and mobile phones - to register young voters and get them to the polls.
Results from Rock the Vote’s Young Voter Modeling Project (pdf)
June 2008 - Mobilizing young voters will be key to political campaign strategies in 2008. However, young voters often lack vote history and other traditional targeting information, so understanding which young adults are most likely to vote, and which are most likely to vote Democrat or Republican, must come from other sources and methods. To address this concern, the bipartisan team of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Public Opinion Strategies conducted an ambitious young voter modeling project for Rock the Vote. See the summary of results or the full report.
Young Voter Mobilization Tactics II (pdf)
June 2007 - Going into the 2006 elections, campaigns and parties knew it would be crucial to turn out every supporter on Election Day – and they put the money and people-power into target races to make it happen. What was a change from recent elections, however, was that an increased number of campaigns and coordinated state efforts targeted young voters in 2006. Overall, 2006 youth outreach efforts proved that if you work the youth vote, it works. Our findings indicate that person-to-person outreach, candidate and experienced staff involvement, strategic use of online social networks, and list-building efforts contributed to increased turnout of young voters and to the success of many 2006 campaigns.
Young Voter Mobilization Tactics (pdf)
January 2007 - For campaigns and nonprofits: a compilation of electoral field research, including the effectiveness and cost per vote turned out by canvassing, volunteer phone calls, robocalls, direct mail, email, and more. Conducted with the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE).
Top Ten Tips to Mobilize Young Voters (pdf)
June 2007 - Political campaigns can effectively bring young voters to the polls by integrating a few simple tactics in their normal campaign activities.
Partisanship: A Lifelong Loyalty that Develops Early (pdf)
February 2007 - Several studies and electoral history show that partisanship develops in early adulthood – the youth vote years. Young adults are more likely than older adults to identify as Independent, a commonsense situation for a group of voters new to politics. Because early adulthood is a time when partisan leanings are forming, young adults are ripe for outreach from political parties and organizations. And a person’s party identification, once formed, remains remarkably stable over a lifetime.
Voting is a Habit (pdf)
February 2007 - One of the most robust empirical regularities discovered in political science is that past voting behavior is a good predictor of future voting behavior. In both 2004 and 2006 young voter turnout increased compared to past election cycles. In other words, millions more young adults have voted in past elections and have begun to become habitual voters. Looking ahead to 2008, young voters are likely to turn out in increased numbers once again.
