Insta-Polling Young Voters. State by State (Updated)
Cross-posted at Tech President. Welcome Tech President readers.
Josh Levy at TechPresident tipped me off to a new, nonpartisan youth politics site that is getting ready to soft launch next week - Our Voice 2008.
On signing up for the site, users complete a profile which includes a sliding-scale ranking of the issues that most concern you (there are about 10 issues between which the scales help you divvy up 100 "points") and rate each of the Presidential candidates. Each month, OV2008 will offer nonpartisan descriptions of various issues (talk about a minefield! How do you describe abortion or health care or any issue in a way that is both useful and unbiased? Solutions have to come from somewhere.) and poll their user-base for their opinions on that issue. Users will be able to display this information on their social networking profiles or websites via widgets developed by OV2008, while the organization itself will push the information out to the presidential campaigns in an attempt to influence the debate.
The idea is interesting, but with such an unscientific method of polling, it will need to reach a very large critical mass of users if it is to produce information of any use to the campaigns, media, or even local organizers. Unfortunately, the project is running very much under the radar at the moment, and the first major data collection period is almost up (October 1st). There's no way to know from the site how many people have created profiles, though with a respectable if insufficient 1,000 friends on Facebook and a paltry 16 friends on MySpace, the project does not appear to have anything close to critical mass, which I place (at minimum) around a few thousand participants in each of the 50 states (or at least the first 5 or 6 primary states). Without that critical mass, it's unclear to me how this becomes more useful to campaigns, media outlets, or nonprifits like Rock the Vote than the internal polls they already produce.
I spoke with Ryan Comfort, the founder of Our Voice 2008, about these issues and Comfort acknowledged that attaining critical mass is the key, and pointed out that they are only in the initial stages of their operation, with the website barely a few weeks old. He and a team of students at the University of Pennsylvania (Comfort is a recent Wharton graduate) are currently working on creating a campus outreach plan. Once that plan is complete, Our Voice 2008 will begin to recruit volunteers at universities across the country whose job it will be to build support for the organization among students.
Even if Our Voice 2008 never reaches the critical mass to become a viable project (the most likely outcome, I think), it remains a solid idea that a more established organization might be able to execute. The idea of insta-polling a large and geographically group of young voters is not radically different from what MySpace and MTV are set to do during their candidate dialogues. The technology is already out there. An organization like Rock the Vote just might have a big enough brand to pull create a critical mass of users, and enough clout within the political community to actually get the campaigns to pay attention to the results.
But then again, since merging with Young Voter Strategies, Rock the Vote already has its own polling and research arm, so the question becomes, is there value added in snap polling in addition to the more methodical polling the organization already employs? I think yes. I'm 29 years old, and never in my life (even when I had a landline) have I been polled. I think a lot of young voters might jump at the chance to participate in such a polling process provided they could:
- Participate remotely and on their own schedule via a social networking widget.
- They knew that the organization conducting the polls was working in the interests of young voters.
- They knew that the organization was committed to pushing the results to the media and the political campaigns.
- They saw that commitment through increased/changed coverage and campaign messaging.
If such a project could operate like the Rock the Vote voter registration widget, and allow organizations to create their own versions and maintain user data, this could be a very interesting development. It remains to be seen of OV2008 can pull it off, or if another organization is willing to pick up on it.
2008 Youth Vote in Context
The following charts and graphs are meant to contextualize the unique role that young voters played in the 2008 election, and their increasingly important role in a winning electoral coalition:
2008 Youth Electoral Map

2004 Youth Electoral Map

Youth Vote Partisan Advantage: 2000 - 2008

Youth Vote Historical Support: 1976 - 2008

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brilliant!
great idea. I've never been polled either and I had a land line up until about a year ago. SO depressing! my only question would be - if done online would it then restrict the polling to people who have computers/internet access thus discounting half of the population who isn't as tech savvy or would want to engage and something like this?
I mean - take the population of people online - divide that by people who use SN sites - divide that by people who pay attention to RTV and you get a sample that is already pretty well informed about both technology and political issues which might skew your findings.
know what I mean?
I would actually be interested in seeing a sample of both worlds and compare the findings to see to what extent they differ
Polling
you are absolutely right, but for a project like this, I that sort of just comes with teh territory. It is something to think about when looking at the results, but I don't know how much you can actually do about it.
I'm just starting a story about the challenges of polling young voters and why a lot of pollsters still don't do a good job of it, despite the fact that everyone knows young voters don't have landlines but we're voting in higher and higher numbers.
M
Online polling
True, online polling is a growth area for research in general, and youth politics in particular. That said, I don't find it especially interesting to make another independent website that supports polling its members - there does not seem to be a value-add or competitive advantage. Does this really add anything over a site like essembly.com?
If OV2008 wants to make its polling useful, at the very least it needs to expand its demographic questions to include gender, race, education, and income. Then the self-selection bias of its membership is somewhat measurable and can be taken into account when analyzing any issue results. A real value-add would be to include data on cell phone and landline ownership, so that the weighted responses could then be integrated with traditional polling into a multi-method study.