In a biennial ritual, my CIRCLE colleagues and I will be working most of the night to calculate the youth turnout from the 2012 election. At this moment, the National Exit Polls are reporting that youth represented 19% of the electorate. That is a promising sign. The youth share of the vote is up a point compared to 18%, and it’s not a bad showing by any standard, since 18-29s represent 21% of the adult population, so they are punching at close to their weight. However, share does not equal turnout, as our handy graphic reveals. Stay tuned tomorrow for our actual turnout estimate, at www.civicyouth.org.

This is really a request for comments and insights, especially from people who worked for Obama in both ’08 and this year. Of course, the situation has changed in many ways, and a presidential re-election campaign is necessarily different from an insurgent primary campaign. But what interests me is the possibility that the campaign’s organizing philosophy has changed in ways that alter the experience of volunteers on the ground.

My impression of the ’08 campaign is of yin and yang. On one hand, HQ in Chicago ran a disciplined, high-tech, extraordinarily sophisticated operation. It excelled in everything from delegate math to placing ads and collecting cell phone numbers. On the other hand, though, the campaign encouraged creativity and debate. “Camp Obama” trained the most committed volunteers in a distinctive style of campaign outreach. They were encouraged not to use a script developed at campaign headquarters, but instead to begin genuine conversations with people in their communities. The campaign’s social network hub was an exciting forum for debate and new ideas. The candidate spoke in detail about his plans for the future, and each proposal incited debate and discussion among his volunteers.

This style was consistent with Obama’s rhetoric of active citizenship. As he campaigned to win the Iowa Caucuses, he said, “I won’t just ask for your vote as a candidate; I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am President of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.” On his first day of office, the new president issued an executive order that directed all agencies to “offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information.”

News reports about this election suggest that yin has eclipsed yang. The re-election campaign is even more efficient at marketing and mobilization, but it has lost its “civic fizz.” The interesting debates are happening in other spaces, volunteers are repeating talking points, and everything is targeted.

In Slate, Sasha Issenberg writes that the behavior of “hundreds of thousands of other canvassers and callers in the closing hours of the election … may look like the basic work of campaigns, the slog of door knocks and repetitive phone calls. But as is the case with much of Obama’s campaign, the dutiful fieldwork is undergirded by sophisticated analytics unmatched by his Republican opponents.” He goes on to describe the algorithms that Chicago uses to place its volunteers and determine their messages.

Reid Cherlin of GQ describes Chicago HQ as stocked with “whiz-bang technologies and startup geniuses.” He reports:

every possible organizational and statistical tool that a campaign wonk could dream up is being marshaled by the campaign ten-fold. … Obama for America, in its sixth continuous year of operation, is a slavishly meritocratic enterprise; the stars of 2008’s groundbreaking field program are now the guys running the organization. These tend to be individuals with ample personal charisma (handy if, say, you’re trying to get a dozen retirees in rural Virginia to devote yet another evening to making calls), a Wall Street trader’s love of spreadsheets, and virtually limitless belief in Barack Obama as a candidate and leader. They love data and systems; they love ‘best practices’ and ‘scaling things up;’ they love visuals.

Campaign manager Jim Messina tells Cherlin he is proud of how headquarters tracks every person who “likes” Obama’s Facebook page and hits them with individually customized messages. Every video and image is professionally designed and tested to reinforce the Obama brand. Messina says, “We just turn every person into an organizer, with technology and with information.” What he really means is: We give everyone tailored advertising material that they can share with a single click. This is not active citizenship; it is social marketing for a brand, borrowed straight from commercial advertising.

But am I missing aspects of the 2012 campaign?

This graph, derived from CIRCLE’s recent polls of young adults, shows that most under-30s do not know three basic facts about voting laws in their own state: when they have to register, whether they can vote early, and whether they will need specific forms of government-issued photo identification to vote.

The United States is very rare in placing the responsibility to register on citizens instead of the government, and unique in running 50 different electoral processes, managed by partisan officials, that change constantly. Young Americans must also navigate the electoral system alone to a degree that was not true 35 or 100 years ago. Then, grassroots political parties, schools, unions, and churches had incentives to teach them to vote, and their parents were probably habitual voters. Now, voting may be rare in their homes, and no big institution really cares whether they vote–apart from privately funded campaigns that are proud (especially on the Democratic side) of their sophistication in micro-targeting only the likely voters and “persuadables.”

I think the public’s support for photo ID laws is at least partly genuine, reflecting a sincere belief that the electoral system is vulnerable to fraud. I disagree, because substantial numbers of eligible citizens lack the approved IDs, and showing photo ID at the polls does not prevent the pervasive forms of fraud. But in any case, IDs represent just one new layer of costs, inconveniences, complications, and barriers to voting. The overall result–usually the lowest turnout of any real democracy in the world–is engineered, not accidental.

I am a pollster. My organization, CIRCLE, just released a national survey of young adults that shows Obama ahead of Romney among likely voters under 30: 52% to 35%.

Pollsters much more prominent than I are under fire. Look at the comment thread on any high-traffic blog post or news article that reports a poll and you will see fervent remarks denouncing the survey for deliberate, partisan bias. Typically, the charge is that a poll showing Obama ahead has been conducted to help Obama (even though one might think that a lowball estimate would work better, by alarming his supporters into voting).

One sees blanket denunciations as well as very precise, faux-erudite critiques. For instance, the Detroit News showed a pro-Romney bias because it has a libertarian editorial board. Nate Silver is cooking the books because the Times is liberal. National polls are biased to Romney because they miss cell phone users. I was on talk radio yesterday in San Francisco, and a caller argued that Obama’s support cannot have declined because of the first presidential debate. Instead, his decline in national polls must be a deliberate distortion to set up the fraud that will occur on Election Day, when Romney will use doctored voting machines to steal the vote.

I would like to say: Who you want to win is different from who’s ahead. The former is a value-judgment; the latter is an empirical proposition. Empirical propositions are true or false. So just because you don’t like a poll, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

This is largely true, but won’t quite suffice.

I do believe that the average of the polls provides an accurate a picture of the horse race. Aggregating all available surveys produces a gigantic sample, and using lots of pollsters’ data reduces the error caused by their specific methods. We said that youth favored Obama by 52%-35%. We had interviewed a randomly recruited online sample from Knowledge Networks. The very same day, completely independently, and using a random-digit-dialing survey of land-lines and cell phones, the Pew Research Center pegged the youth vote at 56%-35%, well within the margin of error of our result. I take this as confirmation of our finding. I do not read it as mere coincidence, because the same thing happens every day. Separate pollsters draw modest random samples of Americans, use different questions and modes of contact, and come up with quite similar results. The method works.

On the other hand:

1. There is no truth now about how people will vote next week. If the polls are supposed to be predictive, that’s not a typical empirical truth.

2. Each poll requires a whole set of choices that affect the findings. We hired Knowledge Networks, which randomly recruits a national sample and provides people with free Internet access if they need it. We drew a random sample of their panel with large minority sub-samples that we adjusted to make the sample resemble the Census demographic profile of 18-29 year-old citizens. We asked respondents: (1) how likely they were to vote, (2) whether they were certain to vote for Obama, and (3) whether they were certain to vote for Romney. (We randomized the order of the two latter questions.) To calculate Obama’s share of the youth vote, we reported the proportion who said that they were extremely likely to vote, they preferred Obama, and they did not prefer Romney.

The alternatives are myriad. If you call people by phone, you are likely to give them a choice of the candidates and code people as undecided only if they refuse to respond. Often, the interviewer pushes back and says, “If you had to choose …?” That reduces the undecided rate, which was fairly high in our poll. The survey can just ask about Obama and Romney, or it can add two minor party candidates (Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein), or it can add even more options. We accepted a generic response about “someone else,” and four percent chose that.

It is typical of social science that truth is somewhat obdurate–not just made up, but stubbornly out there–yet reality is very much colored by our methods and choices.

3. None of us directly calls more than 1,000 Americans to interview them about the presidential election. We trust other people to do that for us. You trust me and my colleagues to survey youth–or I hope you do. We trusted Knowledge Networks to draw a good sample for us. I trusted my colleagues to run the numbers right. Since social knowledge is mediated, it relies on trust of strangers or of institutions, or both. This was the problem for the caller in San Francisco. He took as a premise that Bush had stolen the 2004 election, which would require a very large conspiracy. If that’s afoot, then all the surveys in Nate Silver’s model could be deliberately distorted to show Romney gaining after Oct. 4. Clearly, I do not agree with this, but then again, I would be part of the conspiracy, so why listen to me? More seriously, trust is fundamental, and excessive or automatic trust is foolish. So the questions for all of us are: whom to trust, how much, and when?

CIRCLE today released a poll of young people’s views of the election. Our survey, commissioned by the Youth Education Fund, is unique in that it polled 1,695 youth (ages 18-29) in June/July and 1,109 of the same youth between October 21 and 23. Surveying the same people twice provides powerful evidence of change over time.

• The proportion saying they are extremely likely to vote has risen 9.9 points, from 44.7% to 54.6%. Two-thirds (67.3%) of young adults are “very” or “extremely” likely to vote, up 7.1 percentage points since June/July.
• The proportion who are paying attention to the election has also risen, from 56.1% to 71%.
• If the election were held today, Obama would win the youth vote by 52.1% to 35.1% among those registered voters who are “extremely likely to vote.”

My quote from our press release: “The conventional wisdom holds that youth enthusiasm is down compared to 2008,” said CIRCLE Director Peter Levine. “But intent to vote is rising fast. President Obama has a majority of likely young voters behind him, but a significant proportion are open to voting for Governor Romney, who has a clear opportunity to improve over John McCain’s record-low support in 2008.”

I will be on MSNBC around 11:30 am eastern today, on WGBH-Boston’s Innovation Hub at around 1 pm today, and on KALW-San Franciso at 10 am Pacific tomorrow to discuss, and later I will post the audio or video here.

[Update: actually, MSNBC cancelled to cover Sandy 24/7. But the WGBH discussion with host Kara Miller and the Pew Research Center’s Paul Taylor is available online, here. And the KALW discussion with Ali Budner (the host) and Lee Rowland of the Brennan Center and Tova Andrea Wang of Demos is here.]