News Releases

**Student vote mobilization leaders and experts available for interviews tonight and tomorrow – Contact Sujatha Jahagirdar  (323) 309-6120**

After several months of mobilizing their peers and reaching out to Presidential candidates to get them to pay attention, young volunteers are seeing the rewards of their efforts with record youth turnout in the New Hampshire primaries. According to CNN exit polls, youth will account for nearly 18 percent of the Democratic primary turnout and 14 percent of the Republican primary turnout.

“Once again, tonight’s story is about the youth vote,” said Ellynne Bannon, Director of the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project. “Young volunteers have been engaging all of the Presidential candidates for months – as part of the Student PIRGs’ What’s Your Plan? campaign - and they’ve been registering their peers and turning them out to the polls and it worked.”

Since April, student volunteers with the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project What’s Your Plan? campaign have appeared at every candidate event that they can get into - barbeques, photo-ops, fundraisers and town hall meetings to ask all of the presidential candidates what their plans are on key youth issues and to get them to pay attention to young people. In Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, South Carolina, California, Florida and other states across the country, young volunteers have asked the candidates directly: What’s Your Plan? To address financial security. To make a college education affordable. To stop global warming. To provide affordable, effective health care. Students have also been running voter registration and mobilization drives in many of these states to boost the youth vote turnout.

The strategy has worked. Young people in early primary states played a key role in determining the victors in both Iowa and New Hampshire and are poised to make their voices heard throughout the primary season.

“Young voters proved their power tonight, as the entire country held its breath for college town returns,” said Cassie Schultz, an NHPIRG student leader from Litchfield, New Hampshire.

Democratic youth turnout marked a 3 percent increase in its share of the electorate over 2004. Republican youth turnout marked a 3 percent increase in its share of the electorate over 2000, the last contested Republican primary.

In the coming months, student leaders with the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project will continue to appear at candidate events to ensure that the power of young voters is not forgotten. Volunteers will continue to press the candidates to address issues important to young people. In addition, thousands of student leaders will roll up their sleeves and run intensive peer-to-peer voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives on college campuses throughout the country.

“For months students have tirelessly worked the campaign trail, asking the candidates to address the issues that we care about – like global warming and financial security – and they have. Now the candidates are seeing that when they come out and engage directly on the issues that we care about, we turn out to the polls,” concluded Bannon.

Student Youth Vote Leader Profiles

Sarah Clader, 21 – This fall Sarah, a senior at Rutgers University, spearheaded efforts to register 3,000 students statewide to vote, training students to make class presentations, run dorm storms, and register their peers out on campus. Sarah also coordinated the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group’s (NJPIRG) What's Your Plan? campaign at Rutgers, taking the concerns of young people directly to the candidates. She organized students to attend a Barack Obama event in New York City to ask him: What’s Your Plan? to stop global warming and address financial security for Americans. Sarah has led efforts to register and turnout young voters with New Jersey PIRG since her freshman year and she serves on the Student PIRGs' New Voters Project Advisory Committee alongside Frank Fahrnekopf, Jr., former RNC Chair, and Vice President Walter Mondale. Cell: (908) 868 7511

Mike Reagan, 21 – In the 2006 mid-term elections, Mike led one of the largest voter registration efforts that the University of California, Davis had ever seen, registering 1,500 young people to vote. A college senior, Reagan was energized after testifying this fall before Congress regarding the threat posed by global warming to his generation. To ensure that the voice young people is heard in the California primaries, Reagan will once again mobilize thousands of his fellow students to vote. In the coming weeks he will storm dorms, invade classrooms and stop students on the way to class. He has also issued a challenge to student groups on campus to see who can register the most students.

Cassie Schultz, 19 - Cassie grew up in a family of farmers in Litchfield, New Hampshire. A leader on youth issues, Cassie has organized student call-in days to her Senator and worked to educate fellow students about state legislative efforts to reduce the burden of student debt. Shultz also served as the student representative at a press conference on clean energy policy called by Maine Governor John E. Baldacci.

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New Hampshire Public Interest Research Group’s (NHPIRG) mission is to deliver persistent, result-oriented public interest activism that protects consumers, encourages a fair, sustainable economy, and fosters responsive, democratic government.

The Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project is the nation’s largest youth voter mobilization program.  Since 2004, we have registered more than 600,000 young people and made more than 650,000 peer to peer voter turnout contacts to get young people to the polls on Election Day. Due in large part to our efforts, the youth vote increased by 4.3 million votes, or 9% in 2004 and an analysis of our work in 2006 found that in the student dense precincts in which we worked, the youth vote increased on average by 157%.