News Releases

On Monday night, Democratic Presidential candidates will face questions sent in via YouTube for the first CNN-YouTube debate. The online phenomenon, where anyone can upload and share video clips, is popular with young people, who are paying significantly more attention to the Presidential election than in 2004 (new poll) and voicing their concerns about issues that they care about.  To date, more than 2,000 people have submitted video questions for the debate on Monday.

But young people aren’t just getting online to engage in the elections, they’re also hitting the campaign trail to engage the Presidential candidates on the issues that they care about.

This weekend young people are hot on the trail of Barack Obama in Chicago, Mitt Romney in Iowa, and all the candidates at the debate in Charleston, South Carolina to ask them: “What’s your plan to stop global warming?”  This is part of a new national campaign called What’s Your Plan? to convince Presidential candidates to pay attention to young people and to address key youth issues such as global warming, college affordability, health care and financial security.

Since the campaign launch, young people have spoken to the Presidential candidates, face-to-face, more than thirty times, including: Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Duncan Hunter, John Cox, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, John McCain, Tommy Thompson, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Joe Biden. See photo gallery.

Since 2004, there’s been an astonishing transformation of youth’s voting power and the trend continued in 2006, as two million more youth voted than in the previous mid-term election.

What’s Your Plan? is a project of the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project.  Launched in 2003, the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project is the largest national non-profit, nonpartisan youth voter mobilization effort.  Since 2003, the project registered more than 600,000 young voters and made more than 650,000 personalized Get Out the Vote contacts leading up to Election Day to turn out young voters. http://www.whats-your-plan.org

For More Information

Ellynne Bannon, Director, Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project, 202-468-7635, ebannon@studentpirgs.org

Sujatha Jahagirdar, Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project Program Director, 323-309-6120. sujatha@studentpirgs.org