The 2008 Primaries: Turning Young Voter Potential into Reality
We knew 2008 could be a big year for the youth vote. Youth voter turnout was dramatically up in ’04, ’05, and ‘06. We had an open field of candidates and a compressed primary schedule. More and more hard data showed that youth voter mobilization programs were effective. The one thing left to really turbocharge the youth vote was for the candidates themselves to focus on youth. Some campaigns were talking seriously about doing this. We decided to give all the candidates a little nudge to make sure they did. So we launched our What’s Your Plan? campaign. We recruited and trained 250 “Caucus Rock Stars” to mobilize 5,000 of their peers. We showed up at hundreds of fundraisers, town hall meetings and photo ops in the early primary states to ask the candidates face-to-face to talk to us about the issues we care about. Pairing new technology with classic organizing, we also launched big voter registration and get out the vote drives across the country to show that on the ground efforts to reach young voters work. The strategy worked. Here’s our story…
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