(Orlando, FL) The laws governing registration and voting are confusing, rapidly changing, sometimes deliberately restrictive, and different in every state. In our 2012 youth survey, we found that substantial majorities of 18-29-year-olds did not know or misunderstood the laws that would govern their own voting, just four months before Election Day. Although only a minority of young adults are college students, students face an extra layer of laws governing registration at their campus addresses and use of their college ID at the polls. Students should therefore make sure to use the Brennan Center’s new Student Voter Guide. By clicking on your state, you can immediately see accurate and current information about registration, residency, allowable ID, absentee voting, and early voting.
CIRCLE’s new interactive maps of states and congressional districts are getting a lot of attention. Our congressional district map lets you view any district by various measures of demographics, turnout, socioeconomic variables, the number of local colleges and universities, and two political factors (whether any state ballot measures might mobilize youth in 2014, and whether the district is competitive).
You can compare rates by district, look over time, and see all the districts ranked from highest to lowest. Using some of those tools, we have identified four districts–IA-3, AZ-1, AZ-9, and NY-23–as especially interesting to watch in 2014 if you care about the youth vote.
Previously, we had released a state map (pertinent to Senate races, among other purposes) that shows historical youth turnout rates and other data going back to the 1970s.
It’s tempting to look at the data from previous marijuana initiatives in Washington State and Colorado, but the results are murky. First of all, whether youth turnout rose or fell in those states depends on whether you use the Exit Polls or the Census’ Current Population Survey to estimate it. The former method shows an increase in Colorado in 2012, but the Census doesn’t confirm that trend. In any case, many other factors were in play in those two states–other ballot initiatives and candidate races, demographic shifts, and so on. Even if the increase seen in Colorado was real, it is not clearly attributable to the pot initiative.
Leaving aside the technicalities, I think it’s important to say that marijuana legalization never polls as a high-priority issue for young voters. It’s always far down on their list, well below the economy, jobs, education, and health care. There may be some libertarian-leaning youth (and young people concerned about unfair incarceration*), for whom legalization is a core matter of principle. But they are few. There may also be some young people–as well as some older people–who would just like to be allowed to indulge. But voting is a demanding civic act that correlates with seriousness. If there is an actual stoner voting bloc, I would suspect they are low-propensity voters, quite hard to turn out on a November Tuesday. Other youth voting blocs, from environmentalists to pro-Lifers, will be easier to mobilize.
Again, I do not mean to dismiss the moral seriousness of legalization activists. Whether libertarians or critics of the carceral state (or both), they are raising a real issue, and they will vote if they have a chance. But they are not very numerous. I don’t think they are strongly concentrated among the young. And other issues will matter a lot more to the youth vote in 2014.
(*For full disclosure, I would personally vote to legalize pot and I am very concerned about over-incarceration. But less than 1 percent of state and federal inmates were incarcerated as a result of marijuana laws, so I wouldn’t put my own energy into marijuana legalization as a strategy for reducing incarceration.)
My colleagues and I played a role in the latest report from Nonprofit Vote. I’ve offered the following summary: “Political participation is highly unequal in the United States, and efforts to engage the lowest-income Americans are scattered and under-resourced. One highly promising strategy is to integrate nonpartisan voter registration and outreach into the activities of nonprofits that serve the poorest Americans. The new report from Nonprofit VOTE shows that this approach worked in 2012 and should be strengthened for 2014 and beyond.”
(This is the fifth in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations. This item is cross-posted from The Democracy Fund.)
Although low trust for Congress is widely known, it may be just as significant that “a dwindling majority (57%) [of Americans] say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions” (Pew Research Center, 2007). That trend is consistent with a long and steady decline in generalized social trust, or trust in fellow citizens.
If most people trust their fellow citizens but not the government, they are open to populist forms of political reform, such as referenda, recall, and transparency laws. If most people trust the government but not the people, they may want to consolidate power in the hands of political leaders. But if they trust neither, any reform agenda has a difficult path, and restoring trust in fellow citizens emerges as an important precondition of reform.
When we asked a representative sample to make open-ended comments about today’s political advertising, many respondents blamed voters for deceptive rhetoric, often describing their fellow Americans in scathing terms. They said, for example:
“Most people are sheep, the politicians know this and use propaganda to further [their] own ends. But not all of us are sheep, I try not to play into [their] bullshit.”
“Allowing sheeple [people who act like sheep] to vote reduces elections to pure pandering.”
“Deceptive advertising is reprehensible and ugly, and its popularity today reflects the American public’s inability or unwillingness to think critically and objectively.”
“Most American people believe everything they see on TV and do not take the initiative to research what they are hearing to ensure its validity. This results in the wrong people being elected to offices- people who make our situation a lot worse instead of improving it.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs that the political advertising used today is effective because of a largely ignorant electorate.”
“The general public doesnt know the difference between propaganda and rhetoric and I find most people too lazy to to research topics that they dont understand or dont know what a law is, they just blindly trust the person to be telling the truth.”
“The political ads are of low quality because their target audience is of low quality ….”
“There will always be deception in Politics. How else are you going to get a mass amount of ignorant and uneducated people to follow you?”
We coded only 7 percent of all the open-ended responses as critiques of the American people, so we cannot conclude that this was a majority opinion. On the other hand, our question was very broad—about political advertising in general—and it is notable that 42 people took the opportunity to denounce their fellow citizens.
Similarly, in evaluating Face the Facts USA, John Gastil and Dave Brinker asked representative Americans to watch videos of online conversations, and asked “After watching [the video], do you feel that you would be more able to participate in a political conversation?” Most responses were favorable, but some expressed critical views of the people featured in the videos:
“NO, it made me quite upset and I lost a little faith in humanity listening to all the right wingers”
“I don’t think this will help any political discussions because as was evident in observing some of the chat, liberals and democrats are incapable of remaining calm and decent 100% of the time and right wingers are incapable 90% of the time. Check that fact!! 🙂 People are dug into their positions and there is a war coming, it’s just a matter of when, not if.”
In conjunction with survey data about declining social trust, these responses indicate a challenging situation.
However, as part of the same Face the Facts initiative, AmericaSPEAKS also convened citizens to deliberate in Google Hangouts. Compared to a control group—and compared to people who simply received one-way informative materials—citizens who were randomly chosen to deliberate were more likely to express faith in their fellow citizens as deliberators. Their attitude was measured by their agreement with these statements:
“The first step in solving our common problems is to discuss them together.”
“Even people who strongly disagree can make sound decisions if they sit down and talk.”
“Everyday people from different parties can have civil, respectful conversations about politics.”
So it would appear that actually engaging other people in discussion makes people more favorable to deliberation. Most citizens do not have such experiences. Expanding the scale and prevalence of discussion would have benefits for nonpartisan political reform.
The previous entries in the series can be found below:
