Metrics and Memes

In response to the post I wrote a few weeks ago about the changing narrative around young voters, I received a call from Ivan Frishberg, who sits on the board of Young Voter PAC and the advisory board of CIRCLE. Ivan wrote to me to both confirm and elaborate on my thesis: that the media narrative surrounding young voters has changed and is reaching a potential tipping point this November. In our conversation, he painted an enlightening picture as to how and why the media misreported youth turnout in 2004, and why that narrative is finally changing.

In Ivan’s recounting of the 2004 election, it begins with a strategic plan executed by a coalition that included the New Voters Project and the Youth Vote Coalition. This plan had two goals:

1. Get campaigns to realize the importance of young voters and, consequently, spend a more proportionate share of their campaign warchest to reach young voters; and
2. Improve media coverage of young voters.

The cornerstone of this strategy was the accumulation of reliable data about field work aimed at young voters. Metrics.
Read MoreFrom the get-go, this coalition adopted an evidenced-based approach that was sorely lacking from the work of a majority of youth focused organizations (see below). While the communications staffers at many youth organizations pitched news outlets with cheerleading rhetoric about the power of young voters, YVC and NVP presented the media with raw stats from their field work: money spent, boots on the ground, voters registered. Their plan wasn’t to spin the numbers, but to position youth groups as a credible source of information and allow reporters to draw their own conclusions.

With success in these activities (read: bigger and bigger numbers) came improved coverage. As the campaign progressed, the media created its own storyline based on the supplied data, and by the fall of 2004, that storyline was hyping expectations that the Youth Vote was a sleeping giant ready to tip the election for Kerry. (To be fair, a good number of youth groups and advocates – myself included – were also pushing this narrative pretty hard.)

When Kerry lost, a media backlash ensued against the very narrative that they themselves created. As we now know, this backlash was unleashed before turnout numbers were even analyzed. By the time CIRCLE released verifiable numbers, the post-election young voter narrative was set – yet again youth had “failed to show up.”

Months later, reporters – and more importantly, campaigns – did look at the real numbers. They overcame their cognitive dissonance. Recognizing the power of the youth vote and what it did for Kerry, campaigns began to regard young voters as a natural base they need to pursue – both for immediate gain and the longterm health of the party. This translated into programs, which the media now obligingly covers.

In my previous post, I identified social networking as one of the reasons that young voters are getting good media coverage this cycle, but social networking is really just a single manifestation of the programs that campaigns and the parties are pursuing to reach this vital demographic. Programs that are themselves hyped by the media frenzy around MySpace.

Which brings us to today. I speculated that if the Democrats failed to take at least one chamber of Congress there would be another backlash against young voters for failing to deliver. This seems unlikely since the rise of FoleyGate, but there are a lot of variables still in play and questions still exist: Will turnout increase over 2002 levels? There’s no air war attempting to grab young voters attention like MTV’s Choose or Loose campaign – a tactic that primes young voters to be more receptive to other strategies like peer to peer outreach. Will this lack of investment in broadcast media depress turnout, or is YouTube now creating a new, 24/7/365 air war (potentially a more effective and vastly less expensive form at that)? How will the media report a depressed turnout? What can we do to control expectations and post election reporting?

One thing is clear - and controllable: Qualitatively (and perhaps quantitatively, though that is harder to prove), the media narrative and campaign attitudes towards young voters have changed, and that change is due in no small part to the careful documenting done by the Youth Vote Coalition and the New Voters Project. Metrics matter and if we want to keep - and control - the media’s attention on young voters, and get our organizers their fair share of the campaign warchest, we need to keep measuring our programs, meeting goals, and feeding that information to journalists and campaigns.

A lot of youth groups failed to do this in 2004:

Click to read full report. Full size chart on p24. (PDF)

Proper data collection and tracking of activities is an important part of political work, with implications for communications, fundraising, and the longterm health of the movement. In 2004, many of us were novices. Now we need to grow up. “Rah rah rahs” about the youth vote are great when we’re talking to our members and our base, but those who cut checks and write articles respond best to hard numbers. Collecting good data and being able to prove our effectiveness is a sign of a healthy organization with firm foundations and good long-term prospects.

Young Voter Strategies is funding a number of groups to do work – and measure that work – in 2006. Whether you are canvassing dorms or using MySpace and FaceBook to reach new audiences, all youth groups should contact them – or CIRCLE – to find out more about how to effectively measure the work. That’s how we’ll improve our tactics and get stronger with each passing cycle.