Test That Theory

When we talk about the youth movement in America and ways to get us to engage and participate in the process we often find a huge amount of ambiguity – little hard data/evidence (except the Harvard Institute of Politics or the CIRCLE research) and even fewer willing to conduct experiments into microtargeting the 18-30 demographic.

A few months ago I read a great article that talked about microtargeting Labor Supporters in California. Seems the California Labor Federation was beginning to notice that the stereo-types about supportive labor voters were no longer true. Because the world has evolved – not all labor supporters live in urban areas. Some now living in outer lying surburbes or even rural counties. The CLF’s Chair Art Pulaski decided to look outside the box:

“The shifting demographics of the country mean you have to look for them in non-traditional ways and sometimes in unexpected places…

Traditional targeting has always told us to focus on union members and their families in big cities, and that’s where most labor resources went for persuasion and GOTV efforts in years past. But it’s important not to build a targeting model for today’s voters based on outdated demographic patterns. Understanding that pro-labor voters aren’t just urban union members and their families anymore, we at Winning Directions worked with the CLF team to help find California’s pro-labor voters, wherever they live.”

In reading this piece which you can’t actually get unless you’re a member of C&E talks about how the CLF used a well researched way of targeting specific people and then delivering a compelling message to them to get them to vote in favor of labor supportive issues and candidates.

My thought – which came to me only a few months later is this same strategy can be used in targeting youth voters – only we don’t need to pay to do research on where they are. 18-30 is a lot easier to find than say “labor supportive.”

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could find a district – say a congressional district for someone who won in either the last election or the election before and looked at how many 18-30 year olds voted and who won – any ballot initiatives etc.. And then developed a program that did specific targeting to GOTV young voters or engage young voters about specific issues that matter in the upcoming election and then chart the differences.

My district would be ideal (the KS-02 because there are 5 Universities and a hand full of community colleges) but it doesn’t necessarily matter it can be done with any district but ideally one that would NOT be a target for the presidential candidates or a target for any state-wide candidates – where it is essentially this Congressional seat alone.

What you could do is develop a media campaign around issues that matter to young people and then target them in the media that is of interest to them.

Look at the CLF again:

“Correlating all this information allowed us to rank voters on a scale from “do not contact” to “go get these guys.” Then it became a matter of crafting effective messages and persuasion materials to bring our vote home.”

To test the theory, Winning Directions developed sample targeted direct mail programs based on the results of the Lake Research poll. The mailers, using identified pro-labor messages and messengers, focused on support for a statewide November ballot issue of importance to organized labor: Proposition 87, a measure to create energy independence in California.

I’ve talked before about ways to talk to young people in non-traditional ways – but even here you could use very traditional ways… non-traditionally… if you will.

Take TV for example. Everyone is going to be using TV to talk to voters. Most campaigns use network ads that they run during persuasive times targeting the Baby Boomers – or say “Security Moms” or whatever. Campaigns drop about 800 points of media and run ads that talk about family and blah blah..

What would happen if you developed a campaign around an issue that matters to young people or gets them all steamed and put up an equal number of points on stations like SpikeTV, Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network (during Adult Swim) and the like and did the ads in such a way to communicate to them in a way that is comfortable.

Something Creative like this or even something like this (by far the best of the RTV 06 ads – the rest kinda blow because they took a good idea too far…) And even something a little………. Funky, sorry about that I just HAD to…

Comparable campaigns can be done online with Myspace/Facebook/YouTube that run the ads or “friend” the people in the district leading up to the “revolution” of ads that followed… Then when E-Day is done - char the findings - see how it worked.

My assumption is that you’ll have a dramatic increase in turnout among that demographic in that specific district. Further, there would be proof that young people do vote especially when actively recruited.

Now – that said – financing a project like this would be insanely complicated particularly since many major funders certainly those affiliated with the Democracy Alliance have decided they don’t want to help their children’s generation anymore. Bless their hearts…

But wouldn’t it be an interesting way to really test a lot of the theories we have here and get some real numbers we can talk about that brings light to our movement??

I’m honestly curious about what you guys think we could do that would actually make the party step up and take notice – and generate some support for these types of movements in the future with hard data and findings based on an election….

Happy Friday!