This op-ed of mine was published in the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette on Christmas Day (Dec. 25, 2011), but is not online.

America is watching the Iowa caucuses for clues about how the whole 2012 election will play out. Who will be the nominee? What themes and issues will predominate in the campaign? What new political and strategies will work this time around?

One of the most important questions is how youth will participate. By turning out, they can affect who wins and which issues are discussed, because they have distinctive values and concerns. Their participation also shapes the future of our democracy. A generation that votes and participates while its members are young will remain engaged for decades to come, whereas a generation that is alienated will take but slowly to politics.

In 2008, youth played an important role in the Iowa caucuses, more than tripling their turnout compared to 2004 and opting strongly for the eventual winner, Barack Obama. Four fifths of young Iowa caucus-goers participated on the Democratic side, but young Republican caucus-goers also helped to pick the state’s winner, choosing Governor Mike Huckabee by a substantial margin.

The Iowa caucuses set the tone for the whole season. Youth turnout was strong in the primaries and general election. Young people supported Obama to an unprecedented extent. Not only did they vote, but they set the record for campaign volunteering and were generally enthusiastic and engaged.

Certainly, 2012 could be different. Like older Americans, many young people are discouraged and angry. Recent focus groups conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found Iowa’s young people much less enthusiastic than they were in 2008.

Yet Iowa has a strong and durable tradition of youth participation. The state’s youth turnout rate in general elections always exceeds the national average and is sometimes near the top of the rankings. The same is true of community service and volunteering, in which young Iowans excel.

Although a discouraged national mood may push youth participation down, Iowa’s strong civic traditions should boost turnout if campaigns, politicians, and civic leaders work to engage young people in the election.

The research on youth voting offers some lessons.

• Reach out to young people personally: they respond much better to individualized encouragement and two-way conversations than to mass advertising and news events.
• Keep the message relatively moderate and bipartisan. Of the young Iowans who participated in the 2008 GOP caucus, more considered themselves “moderate” than “very conservative,” and that balance reflects national trends.
• Don’t forget the 17-year-olds, who have a right to participate in Iowa’s caucuses if they will turn 18 by November 2008.
• Finally, give young people serious responsibilities in the campaign—they will perform well and bring their peers with them.

Peter Levine directs CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.

We at CIRCLE provide detailed data on young voters, including demographic information and voting trends for all 50 states (accessible through the map on our homepage), in-depth research studies on young people and politics, and a recent overview report based on our own typology. Meanwhile, the Harvard Institute of Politics is contributing up-to-date national polls and focus groups in Iowa. Their latest poll (PDF) looks technically solid to me. It contains some interesting findings:

• Eleven percent of young people support the Tea Party; 21% support Occupy Wall Street. Assuming that those two groups are largely composed of different people, that means that up to 32% of young Americans support an extra-partisan political movement. In 2008, youth activism was strong, but the most unusual aspect was massive support for one official political campaign. I think if youth activism proves important in 2012, it will be about young people participating through a variety of channels, not just presidential campaigns. Lest we get carried away with the potential of the insurgent movements, just 2% of respondents say they have been part of an OWS demonstration and 6% say they are following the movement “closely.”
• One finding  seems to be attracting media attention today: only 30% of young people expect Obama to win, and 36% expect him to lose. I am not clear why this is interesting, unless confidence in his reelection is correlated with turnout. In 2008, most Obama supporters I knew did not believe he would win, but they worked and voted for him.
• Barack Obama beats the generic Republican candidate as well as all named GOP candidates, albeit with many undecided. (In fact, the undecideds almost tie the Obama supporters in the generic matchup.)
• Mitt Romney leads among young Republicans (at 23%). Ron Paul is next at 16%. The Ron Paul boomlet could matter to the nominating race. A recent Public Policy poll finds Paul actually leading among young Iowa Republicans. But that doesn’t mean that the typical young person supports Paul. Obama backers are far more numerous; they just don’t get to vote in the Republican primaries.
• Young people’s top issue priorities are all economic. That’s also true of older people, according to other surveys. Never in my decade of working on youth and politics have I seen a big gap between young and older people on issues. That means, by the way, that candidates don’t need separate messages or agendas to appeal to young people; they must simply include them in their outreach.

Republican voters currently prefer Newt Gingrich for their party’s nomination and consider him the most “electable” candidate against President Obama. If the DNC cooked up a Republican candidate in its secret underground labs, I don’t see how they could come up with a better prototype opponent–at a time of revulsion against Congress and Wall Street–than a career politician who was sanctioned for ethics violations while also conducting a secret extramarital affair, who left Congress to become a rich lobbyist, who is personally undisciplined and arrogant, and who enters the campaign season with virtually no money or organization.

But it’s a serious question why Republican voters currently favor him in polls.

We have sorted ourselves into largely homogeneous political communities that only talk to themselves. To judge by some conservative talk-radio that I recently heard, Barack Obama is setting records for abysmally low popularity and should be planning an immediate resignation. (Actual polls show his personal favorability at 47.9%, with 47% unfavorable) Plenty of conservatives live in physical and virtual communities completely free of liberals. Assuming that Obama is sure to lose in a landslide, and hearing very little criticism of the Republican movement that Gingrich once led, they are naturally optimistic about the former Speaker.

I think their isolation is particularly acute, because they have not accepted that most Americans reject strong versions of conservatism–whereas liberals tend to know that their side is a minority. But there are liberals who really believe that 99% of the American people are behind the Occupy Wall Street Movement. That is also a sign of isolation. (For the record, when asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum, 22 percent of Americans identified as liberals in 2008, 32 percent called themselves conservative, and the rest said “moderate” or “don’t know.” I include “slightly liberal” and “slightly conservative” among the liberals and conservatives.)

If the ruling coalition is in an echo-chamber, sheltered from critical views and convinced that all contrary evidence is manufactured by shadowy elites, that is dangerous for the whole country. But if the opposition party is in an echo-chamber, that is mainly bad for them. They are liable to make tactically foolish decisions.

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I will be on MSNBC for a few minutes between 2 pm and 3 pm Eastern today, talking about the new voter ID requirements that are passing state legislatures. By my count, 11 states require or will soon require voters to show photo identification at the polls (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin). Eight of those states (Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin) added or tightened their requirements this year. Similar requirements are pending in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Governors in five states vetoed ID requirements recently (North Carolina, Montana, Missouri, Minnesota and New Hampshire).

Our election process is already cumbersome and difficult: the very opposite of “customer-friendly.” What business would require you to register for a service months before you were able to receive it–without contacting you before the deadline–and then allow you to get the service only if you showed up in person during specified hours during one particular weekday? A business might handle an extreme shortage that way, but voting is supposed to be for everyone.

A photo ID requirement doesn’t create an extra hurdle for people who already carry driver’s licenses, but at least 10 percent of American citizens do not. Most suburbanites get their licenses when they are sixteen, but most young urban residents do not. Only about one in four young African American adults in the city of Milwaukee hold driver’s licenses (PDF). Whole categories of people, such as individuals who can’t afford to drive or whose disabilities prevent them from driving, do not typically carry state photo ID. They can obtain state ID even if they cannot drive, but that costs money in most states and always adds a third chore to the voting process (getting ID, registering, and then voting).

We have reviewed the empirical studies of existing voter ID laws and found small estimates of the actual effect on turnout: from statistically insignificant to 2.9%. (Alvarez, Bailey, & Katz, 2007; Vercellotti & Anderson, 2006; Eagleton Institute of Politics and Moritz College of Law, 2006; Pastor et al., 2008; Ansolabhere, 2007; Mycoff et al., 2009). Americans should hope that the effects of the new laws will, in fact, be small. On the other hand, the published studies are correlational and based on relatively rare and idiosyncratic laws. The effects of widespread, very tight laws may be worse. Also, if whole subpopulations lack photo ID and yet voter ID requirements do not statistically reduce their turnout, that’s because their turnout is very low already. It is unconscionable to put a legal ceiling on their participation.

There is no need for these new laws. People hardly ever commit voter fraud by showing up at the polls to cast ineligible ballots. You would risk a felony conviction for trying that, and for what? To add one vote to your favorite candidate’s total? Most people vote out of civic duty or group solidarity, not for direct personal benefit. There were four documented instances of ineligible voters trying to vote in Ohio in 2002 and 2004–out of 9 million votes cast (PDF).

As a matter of principle, I do not attribute motives to people without lots of evidence. So I do not know why these voter ID laws are so popular among state legislators–especially Republicans, although in Rhode Island, Democrats enacted the new rules. Perhaps legislators genuinely fear voter fraud or are responding to public pressure for new rules. (There is grassroots pressure, as you can tell from listening to conservative talk radio.) The worst motive, of course, would be to disenfranchise your political opponents, and at least one legislator is on the record with that goal: “New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, a Republican, told a tea party group that allowing people to register and vote on Election Day led to ‘the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.'”

My post for the day is an editorial over at The Root, entitled:

Young, Black and Voting

Your Take: Young African Americans are engaged in politics but aren’t guaranteed to turn out in 2012.