Harvard Institute of Politics

This may not be ground-breaking news, but I thought I'd post something about it anyway.

In a survey of 2,406 18-24 year old Americans conducted by Harris Interactive from September 12th through October 6th, 2008, the Harvard University Institute of Politics found that youth continue to be a strong force in this campaign, and they have, by and large, placed most of their enthusiasm and energy behind the Obama campaign.

• U.S. Senator Barack Obama is favored among 18-24 year-old likely voters by nearly a 2-1 margin over U.S. Senator John McCain in the race for President. Just weeks before Election Day, Senator Obama holds a twenty-six point lead (56%-30%; 15% undecided) over Senator McCain in the 2008 presidential race, a lead that has remained virtually unchanged since July (55%-32%) and March (53%-32%) 2008 IOP polling. Obama’s lead grows slightly among young people saying they will “definitely” be voting (59%-31%). As IOP polling also showed in July, young people continue to say they “trust” Obama more than McCain on eight out of ten major domestic and foreign policy issues facing the country.
• Youth are ready to answer a new call for public service, including working in government. Almost six in ten (59%) 18-24 year-olds say that they are personally interested in engaging in some form of public service to help the country. Nearly one-half (47%) of this group said engagement could include working for the federal, state or local government; almost a third (32%) said they would think about getting involved in a political campaign; and nearly two in ten (17%) said they would consider running for office. Importantly, this is one issue where strong support is seen regardless of party (Democrats 68%, Republicans 63%, Independents 57%), presidential candidate supported (67% Obama supporters, 63% McCain supporters), or gender (63% women, 55% men) of young people today.
• Economy is ten times more important to young people today than one year ago. More than half of young people (53%) say economic issues are their top concern. IOP polling showed 30% of young people expressing the same opinion in March and only 5% in the fall of 2007. During the same time period, the percentage of young people who said Iraq and the War in general was their top concern fell from 37% (fall 2007) to 20% (March 2008) to 9% today. No other issue in this year's poll garnered more than 9%.
• Sen. Biden Vice-Presidential pick shows little effect, while Gov. Palin pick has hurt among Independents and women. When 18-24 year-old likely voters were asked whether each candidate’s vice-presidential selection made them more or less likely to support that ticket in November, six in ten (60%) said that Senator Obama’s pick of U.S. Senator Joe Biden made no difference with just 21% saying the pick made them more likely and 19% saying less likely to support the ticket (Net effect: 2% points positive). However, while only 35% of young people said Senator McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made no difference, 40% of young voters said the pick made them “less likely” to support the ticket with 25% saying “more likely.” (Net effect: 15% points negative). Among young people self-identifying as Independents, the Biden VP pick had a net 8% point negative effect, while the Palin VP pick had a net 22% point negative effect.
• More than half of young people currently supporting a presidential candidate are interested in volunteering for their candidate’s campaign. Among 18-24 year-olds currently supporting Senator Obama, nearly six in ten (57%) say they would be interested in volunteering for the presidential campaign if asked (17% very interested; 40% somewhat interested). Slightly less than half (47%) of Senator McCain supporters said they would volunteer on their candidate’s campaign if asked to do so (16% very interested, 31% somewhat interested).

[...]

• More young people see the effectiveness of political engagement than one year ago. Nearly seven in ten 18-24 year-olds today (69%) say they see political engagement as an effective way of solving our nation’s problems, up six percentage points from fall 2007 (63%) and fall 2006 (60%) IOP polling. Fewer young people today agree that politics is not relevant to their lives (28%) than did one year ago (32%) and fewer believe that elected officials don’t share their priorities (69%) than did one year ago (71%) or two years ago (75%). In addition, over six in ten young people (68%) say running for office is an honorable thing to do, up from one year ago (67%) and two years ago (66%).

The thing that sticks out to me is the total rejection of McCain and his philosophy. At the top of the bulleted list of outcomes, the first two are the most telling. Obama's lead has largely stayed the same; if it did change at all, he gained a few more percentage points compared to March's numbers. But when we pair that with the bullet point immediately below, we get that basis for the strong, rock-solid support for Obama: activism through sacrifice and working within the system. With Obama repeatedly linking a call to service with this nation's young people, he's clearly established trust with this age group on this issue -- even among Republicans and McCain supporters. This notion of serving something greater than yourself is very appealing to them, given their loads of experience with volunteerism and the large-scale social traumas they've gone through (9/11, Katrina, financial meltdown). While McCain pushes the military as a way of serving the greater good, Obama sees more diversified opportunities. And you can even see this dedication to serving others in the numbers that are willing to volunteer for their candidate's campaign. Obama's recognized this and with his fundraising advantage, has enabled hundreds of thousands of youth to have those opportunities in many small towns across the country. With McCain's limited financial resources, he doesn't offer those same opportunities (even though his supporters also want to be more involved).

The other thing I noticed is the job this election has done in raising enthusiasm for the political process as a means of creating positive change. Over the past few years, this election cycle has convinced one person in every group of ten 18-24 year olds that the political process is effective. With six out of ten already agreeing with this premise two years ago in 2006, seven out of ten now agree.

Finally, as we've been able to establish for a few weeks now, the idea that Palin somehow attracted and mobilized a large segment of youth for the GOP ticket is, well.. bunk. Young people are repelled from the ticket (40% said it made them less likely to support the ticket, compared with 25%, who said it made them more likely).

It's been really touching to see all the concern-trolling in conservative corners about Obama's youth vote slipping away. Unfortunately, it's just not true. A few weeks ago Democracy Corps reported that their latest survey found Obama with a stable 60 - 33% lead over Senator Obama McCain among young voters.

Just yesterday, the Harvard Institute of Politics confirmed that substantial lead. In their latest fall survey, the Harvard Institute of Politics found that Senator Obama continues to lead John McCain among young voters by a margin of 55 - 32%, a number not substantially changed since their last poll in the spring.

To put this into context, Harvard IOP polling from the 2004 election cycle showed Senator John Kerry with a 13-percentage point (52%-39%) lead among college students in the month leading up to the election. According to exit poll results, Senator Kerry won the total youth vote (18-29 year olds) in 2004, by a 9-point margin, 54%-45%.

Other findings:

Enthusiasm Gap:

In addition to the current gap in the horse race, a significant “enthusiasm” gap exists between Obama and McCain supporters on this issue. Slightly more than four-in-five (83%) young voters planning to vote for Obama tell us that they are excited about the election this fall, which is 27 percentage points higher than McCain’s supporters (56%). It should be noted that 44% of Obama supporters say they are “very excited,” while only 11% of McCain supporters say the same.

In addition, 68% of all young female voters say they are excited (56% of male voters), 74% of African Americans, 64% of young Hispanic/Latino voters and 60% of young Born-Again-
Christians are excited about the election this fall.

In politics, excitement often translates into engagement and this is most certainly the case for both Obama and McCain supporters this year. A slight majority of Senator Obama’s supporters (51%) indicate that they were interested in volunteering (12% very interested) on the campaign and 39
percent of McCain’s supporters said the same (13% very interested). These numbers translate to hundreds of thousands of potential volunteers for both campaigns – ready and willing to engage if asked.

On the Issues:

As I've said in the past, don't trust the polls put out by Zogby or traditional media outlets. Frequently their sample size of young voters is too small to be meaningful, and often they do not poll online or by cellphone, missing a lot of young voters (particularly young latinos) who tend to skew towards Obama. They also tend to blur the lines at times, reporting on 18 - 35 or 18 - 40 as "youth," instead of the traditional 18 - 29 age range. The end result is oftentimes polls are comparing apples and oranges.

If you do report on those polls, be sure to mark those caveats and discrepancies. Make sure you know what their sample size and margin of error is within the young voter demographic. Here's the methodology of the Harvard Survey:

As part of Harvard’s Institute of Politics ongoing analysis of 18 to 24 year old voters dating back to 2000, the IOP has conducted a survey of N=1,031 18 to 24 year olds on issues related to the 2008 campaign for President. This project is an interim update to our Biannual Youth Survey on Politics and Public Service, which saw its 14th release issued on April 24, 2008. The interviewing period for this study was between July 28 and August 12, 2008; all interviews were conducted online by our research partner, Harris Interactive.

Over the course of the last week, I've picked through the polling results from the recent Harvard Institute of Politics Survey and the joint MTV/CBS News poll. We've talked about Obama's lead among young voters, and McCain's deficit among the same, and we've talked about how young people are engaged at a much higher level this year than in previous years. Now I want to take a look at young voter's policy concerns.

There tend to be a few bits of conventional wisdom when it comes to young voters and policy issues. The first is that the only thing young people care about is the draft, or as Ralph Nader recently (and inaccurately) stated, the only thing that will increase youth engagement is the threat of a draft. The second is that young people are consumed by humanitarian issues like the genocide in Darfur. There are grains of truth in both statements - in 2004 there was a lot of messaging done by Rock the Vote and other groups around the draft that did in fact help spur youth turnout, and young people are disproportionately active around the issue of genocide. As with most pieces of conventional wisdom, though, these do not convey the whole truth.

The results of the Harvard IOP Survey reveal that the concerns of young voters have shifted radically since the fall of 2007. Six months ago, Iraq was the #1 issue for 37% of young Americans. Today, that number has shrunk to 20%. In March 2007, the economy was the top concern of just 5% of young people. Today it ranks as the greatest concern of 30% of young voters. The war was a motivator for youth action in 2004, but in 2008, it seems that the tanking economy will drive young people to the ballot box.

The Harvard IOP Survey honed in on these concerns through its novel use of multiple criteria in ranking the importance of youth issues. The survey asked respondents what issues were most important in determining how they would cast their ballot in November and what issues were most relevant to them personally. They used answers in both categories to construct a composite score that could more accurately reflect the importance of various policy issues to young voters:

The reasons for this shift, it turns out, is that most young people feel that our current economic downtown has a greater impact on them personally than the war. Young people who are applying to college or attending school are worried about the skyrocketing costs of tuition. Many are graduating from college, on average, with $20k in debt, and they are worried about their job prospects. According to the survey, 70% of college students believe that it will be difficult to find a job upon graduation. By contrast, the war only directly affects a small portion of young people today. If you are worried about how you will pay off your student loans and make rent next month, it gets a lot harder to worry about something happening on the other side of the globe. It's probably even harder when you consider how much activism has gone to opposing the war with so few tangible results.

Looking through the chart, there are some other interesting facts to be gleaned about the activism and policy concerns of the Millennial generation. In most polls that I've seen, the environment ranks well below bread and butter issues like the economy and health care. As the graph above shows, the environment typically garners a paltry 5% or so of support from most youth. Yet the environment usually is considered one of the policy areas around which young people - particularly college students - are most active. Meanwhile, health care consistently ranks as one of the top concerns of young people, but there is almost no youth activism around universal health care. It's a strange dichotomy and I've been at a loss to explain it.

Judging by the IOP results, "Net Relevance" seems to be the key. Both issues are perceived as important ones, yet for some reason young people tend to see the environment as a policy concern that more directly affects their lives. It's an interesting finding, and may be skewed by the fact that the survey sampled 18 - 24 year olds, fully half of which are in college and are thus likely to be on their university's health care plan (or that of their parents). I wonder if the two stats might reverse (and fall more in line with conventional wisdom) if the sample was expanded to cover all 18 - 29 year olds?

What's clear is that young people are driven by a variety of concerns, but the economy trumps all. In a year of record youth turnout, candidates up and down the ballot would do well to talk about creating an economy that help the Millennial generation - also known as Generation Debt - climb out of the economic hole.

• Anastasia Goodstein notes an interesting divide among social network users - those who replicate their offline social networks online, and those who use social networks to expand beyond their geographic communities into more niche, culturally based communities. Definitely worth thinking about if you're an online organizer. - Ypulse
• Project Vote notes that the VA is keeping wounded veterans off the voter roles. - Open Left
• John Ashcroft gets pwned by a college student on the question of waterboarding. - FireDogLake
• Alan Rosenblatt gets an up close look at MTV's Street Team '08 and declares the channel "still on the cutting edge" when it comes to political news We tend to agree, MTV has done impressive work so far this cycle. -TechPresident
• The Harvard IOP survey is getting more media play today. Check out write-ups in the Seattle PI, Boston Globe, and a blog post by IOP Director John Della Volpe.
• I haven't stopped by in a while, but looks like HillBlazers, the Clinton youth website, is a little more robust these days. So is her whole internet presence, argues Xavier Lopez-Ayaia. -TechPresident
  

In what is becoming a fine tradition around these parts, here's more information courtesy of the Harvard IOP survey showing that McCain has a snowball's chance in hell of capturing the youth vote this year.

As you can see, Obama has a pretty much insurmountable 21 point lead among 18 - 24 year olds, and even Clinton has a healthy 7 point lead.

Digging into the cross tabs a bit more, we can see just where Obama's striking lead comes from. In match-ups vs. Sen. McCain, Obama outperforms Clinton among self-identified Democrats and Arican Americans, and seriously eats into Sen. McCain's youth base - young white voters. He also, amazingly, pulls young Republican voters away from McCain.

Notice also that a Clinton candidacy further opens the door for Demcoratic losses to third party candidate Ralph Nader. That's a little scary - particularly if you were around and voted in 2000.

One more significant finding in the IOP data is that Sen. Obama is currently polling 3x better among college students at this time in the campaign than Sen. Kerry was against President Bush at this time in 2004.

In March 2004, Sen. Kerry was leading 48 to 38% among college students. That margin basically held. On election day Kerry won all youth 54 - 45%. Obama currently leads McCain 54 - 28%. I would like to see that margin repeated this November.

This was too interesting not to post right away. As part of their survey, and in recognition that many young people allegedly get their news from Comedy Central, the IOP asked their 2000 + respondents whether they preferred Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert (or neither). The responses were interesting to say the least.

Apparently Colbert pics up the youthiest of the youth vote (18 and 19 year olds), as well as young Republicans/conservatives and young religious voters. Stewart pics up the older respondents and the more died-in-the-wool liberals. Those Colbert viewers know it's satire, right?

Bizarro world viewership stats aside, I think it's most telling that a plurality of young people don't know or don't care about Stewart and Colbert. We are definitely living in a niche world, and Stewart and Colbert are not the modern day Walter Cronkite, however much we might like it to be so.

Two new polls of young voters came out this week. A few days ago MTV and CBS News released a poll on young voters (18 - 29), and earlier today the Harvard Institute of Politics released their spring survey of over 2,000 college and non-college 18 - 24 year olds.

There are a ton of data in each poll, and rather than post one mammoth (and probably unreadable) blog post on each of them, I'm going to spend the next two or three days picking out the interesting bits of information in smaller, bite-sized posts.

Right now I just want to start with the comparative topline data from the Harvard IOP Poll. It seems that by every indicator, young people - college and non-college - are more engaged in the political process than at this time last year or in 2004. This is not unexpected, but definitely worth mentioning. From the survey:

• 76 percent of 18 - 24 year olds say they are registered to vote an increase of 7 points since November (the last time the IOP conducted a survey).
• 60 percent of college students have seen voter registration materials around their school, an increase of 15 points since November.
• Nearly two-thirds (64%) of eligible young voters (72% of college students and 61% of those not in college) indicate that they will participate in the general election. This is an increase of three percentage points (3%) since the November 2007 survey.
• Young Americans who consider themselves to be politically engaged or active increased 5 percentage points, from 35 percent to 40 percent.
• Compared to this point in the calendar during the 2004 campaign cycle, which saw a 31 percent increase in youth participation compared to 2000, the percentage of college students who say that they are definitely voting has increased 10 percentage points (62% to 72%).
• The percentage of college students who are following the campaign closely increased 11 points, from 62 to 73 percent.

I'll have more shortly as I work my way through the survey.

Two quick things to note.

First, on the three theories as to how Clinton won the 25 - 29 vote, exit polling by The Harvard Institute of Politics suggests that it was NOT young women who drove Clinton to victory. According to the IOP, Obama and Clinton split young women (under 30) evenly. I spoke with John Della Volpe from the IOP, and he seemed to think that Clinton's messaging about issues to young voters (vs talk of hope) resonated with non-college youth, and he also thought that my theory about college graduates migrating out of state might be correct.

Also interesting - IOP gives Obama a narrow win among 25 - 29 year olds. I also saw some private polling from those involved in the Clinton campaign last night suggesting the same thing. CNN and the network exit polls MIGHT be wrong here.

Second, Rasmussen's youth cross tabs taken in the days prior to the New Hampshire primary showed a much tighter race than what we saw in Iowa:

Obama: 38%
Clinton: 26%
Edwards: 17%

Turns out his results were much closer to the truth. It's too bad he didn't break them down beyond 18 - 29, but the samples were probably impossibly small. So this wasn't entirely unpredictable. We, and I, bought into some of the hype.

As promised, here's my take/overview of the more interesting parts of the new Harvard Institute of Politics Fall Survey. The survey interviewed over 2,500 18-24 year olds, half of whom have or are currently attending college, and half who are/have not.

It's important to note - especially in light of comments by so-called experts like Charlie Cook that recent youth turnout trends "are a blip" - that the IOP opens their report with strong statements about how radically the youth vote has changed since they first started the survey in 2000:

The level of political and community engagement that we have identified and quantified over the last several years stands in contrast to our first IOP survey released in the spring of 2000. At that time, we were in a cycle of record low turnout among college-aged youth and we found a major disconnect between young Americans and the political process.

From 9/11, to Iraq, to Katrina, to threats of global warming and concern for our health care system, much has changed over the course of thirteen surveys, including the level of engagement of young Americans in politics. Since our first survey in 2000 we have witnessed:

• voter turnout among 18 to 24 year-olds in the United States grow approximately 31 percent -- from 36 percent in the 2000 presidential election to 47 percent in the 2004 election.
• young voters propel Jim Webb (VA) and Jon Tester (MT) to the U.S. Senate in 2006 giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years.
• hundreds, if not thousands, of organic social groups of young Americans flourish online and offline in support of favored candidates or pressing policy issues.

I hope that John Della Volpe, the head of the Institute, gets lots of network and cable TV time on this. His statements stand in stark contrast to those of the Charlie Cooks of American Politics, and he's a credible face for young voters in a media often hostile to his and our message.

Some interesting developments in the Presidential campaigns:

Young Republicans are dissatisfied with nearly all of their choices (note that this came before Huckabee's surge), and even Giuliani, long the favorite, is losing significant support. Meanwhile, Democratic leaning youth continue to coalesce around Obama, though it's a much closer race than nationally between he and Clinton than we've seen in some state polling. The survey has some interesting information on just how that Hillary/Obama support breaks down:

At about the time the IOP poll was taken, Hillary Clinton maintained a very solid 19-point lead over Barack Obama (44%-25%) in national polling of all registered voters, while among only young Democrats aged 18 to 24, Obama led by 5 -- a 30 percentage point swing.

• Obama leads Clinton, 44%-23%, on college campuses, but Clinton leads Obama, 38%-31% among those who never attended college;
• Obama leads Clinton, 37%-28%, among Whites, 62%-25% among African Americans, but trails 54%-20% among Hispanics;
• Obama leads Clinton, 40%-28%, among men; Clinton leads Obama by only one, 37%-36% among women;
• Obama leads Clinton, 51%-26% in the Midwest and 42%-29% in the East, but Obama trails Clinton by 9 in the South and by 6 in the West.

Particularly interesting is Obama's advantage among African American youth, and Hillary's notable lack of advantage among young women. Obama has faced a lot of questioning for a lack of support among African Americans, and conventional wisdom has stated that Hillary's lead has come from her advantage among women. It appears that neither of these demographic patters hold true among young voters, and indeed this could be in part where Obama's surge of support is coming from.

Polling Variances
Apropos of my post earlier today, I found it interesting that polling young voters on a landline or on a cellphone yielded significantly different results when asking about Presidential choice among Democratic leaning voters:

Perhaps most importantly to any consumer of public opinion data on the Millennial Generation, the Democratic nomination looks significantly different based on the kind of sampling that is employed (Random Digit Dialing via landline or web-based). By a statistically significant margin, Hillary Clinton does better among young voters with landline telephone access (leads by 5) than she does with voters who do not have landlines (trails by 13) and maintain only cell or VOIP service (a significant and growing segment of the electorate).

I don't have any figures, but perhaps college-educated youth are the most likely to have cell phones in place of a landline, accounting for the discrepancy. However, hispanic voters are supposedly more likely than any other demographic to use a cell phone as their only line, and that group is breaking towards Hillary by a large margin (reported above). My best guess is that there still aren't enough hispanic youth to overcome Obama's advantage among college (and white) youth.

Party Support by Demographic

This was very interesting. "Independent" still seems to be the preferred label of young voters, regardless of their other demographic categories, but among the parties, Democrats retain an advantage or at least a tie with Republicans among every single demographic group except "white," "evengelical," and "protestant." And the Republican advantage among "whites" is only 2%. In fact, "evangelicals" is the only demographic category in which Republicans hold a statistically significant lead over Democrats.

This bodes well for the future, as the white evangelical demographic is likely to fall in influence as the country continues to become more diverse. This is the making of the progressive future majority in 10, 20, 30 years time.

The end of cynicism?
Lots of folks are fond of saying that young voters are cynical about politics. That may be true, but the IOP survey continues to confirm that young people have faith in our government an in the power of political action, and in fact, that view is gaining currency among more young people than ever before:

Compared to 2006, slightly more young people believe that political engagement is an effective way of solving important issues facing the country. Overall, 63 percent of 18 to 24 year olds in the IOP poll reported that political engagement was effective, 37 percent said not effective. This constitutes a net 6-point swing from last year.

The future looks bright for Democrats.

Cross posted at MyDD. Recommend it if you can, it helps build traffic for the site.

The Harvard Institute of Politics released their spring survey of young voters this week. The survey has a sample size of 2,923 young voters - defined as 18-24 year olds - and was roughly split 50/50 between college students and non-college youth. For reporting on the horse race, I'll refer you to this piece in The Hill and this piece by guest blogger Jason Fink, below.

Here's a run down on some of the more interesting findings that you won't see in the mainstream media reporting:

Youth Vote: Getting to the First of Many Thirds
I've written before about how the trends among young voters are encouraging for progressives, but we can't view the recent swing in progressive partisanship among young voters as a given. Some stats in the IOP spring survey continue to back that up.

79% of all 18-24 year olds (college and non-college) are either not sure or don't think that the direction of the country has changed as a result of Democrats taking control of Congress. Iraq is by far the most pressing issue among these young voters, with 27% of non-college and 35% of college respondents ranking it as their #1 concern. No other issues comes close to ranking as highly. We'll see if that remains true after the events at Virginia Tech and the Supreme Court's recent decision, but at the time of the poll, Iraq was the issue for Millennials, and Democrats are clearly not doing enough to convince these voters that the party can effect change and put the country back on track. That puts the youth vote up for grabs - maybe not in the Presidential race in '08, but certainly in down-ticket races and in future elections that aren't a direct referendum on the Bush Administration.

On participation in the primaries: 71% of non-college and 85% of college students said they are registered to vote, and 64% say they are likely to vote in a primary or caucus. It sounds great, but a whopping 55% aren't sure in which primary or caucus (Republican or Democrat) they will vote.

Two things might be happening here: