GOTV

Sorry for my miss on the usual Friday blog, I was traveling home from the Inaugural festivities. But an exciting thing happened in the world of recognition of youth campaigning.... Campaigns and Elections Magazine - the end all be all mag for politico's who work in ... well... campaigns and elections had their regular post-election vote on best practices that worked and which were the super best for their Reed Awards.

Trick or Vote, the Halloween GOTV program that gets young people to canvas in costume just a few days before the election, was voted the best GOTV.

"Our volunteers just did amazing work on Halloween," said Matt Singer, CEO of Forward Montana in a release. "We managed to reach out to over five thousand households in Missoula, Bozeman, Dillon, and Great Falls."

"We might be too old to trick or treat, but we’ll never be too old to trick or vote,” added Rep. Jefferson Smith, founding chair of the Bus Federation, which oversaw the national Trick or Vote operation. “The really important part about this event’s success was our ability to translate a cool idea to being used all across the country. This was a shared success of the youth vote movement, with a number of local organizations using this model."

The Campaign & Elections’ Politics magazine Reed Awards were awarded by a prominent bipartisan committee of political heavyweights, including Morton Blackwell, Tucker Carlson, Tom Davis, Monica Dixon, Ben Dworkin, Vic Fazio, Martin Frost, Julie Germany, Shane Greer, Ken Khachigian, Mike Hennessy, Ron Klain, Mike Krempasky, Kevin Madden, Mark, McKinnon, Dick Morris, Terry Nelson, Christie Pelosi, Amy Pritchard, Larry Sabato, Ron Silver, Jamal Simmons, Michael Steele, George Stephanopolous, Robert Traynham, Joe Trippi, Suzanne Turner, Vaughn Ververs, Amy Walter, Christine Todd Whitman, and Reid Wilson.

Also, if you haven't seen, the Scary Man himself, Wes Craven announced Trick or Vote as one of his favorite scary videos on YouTube this Halloween.

If you don't have a Trick or Vote near you, don't worry... you can have one. Go to TrickOrVote.org and grab the tool kit and start gearing up early for a great Trick or Vote in your city.

Earlier this week I posted two blog entries commenting on a post by Erica Williams pertaining to the current state of youth organizing. Erica made one final point that I'd still like to address:

Who are we kidding? Many people voted because of Obama. Deal with it. I think one of the main failures of youth vote advocates this election season was in the shallowness and transparency of our messaging. The message that “young people voted on the issues” never broke through to mainstream media because it frankly wasn’t true. It was a message set up to support our organizational missions and demand legitimacy and credibility not just for our constituency, but mostly for our own work. And I understand that. But there is a difference between saying that young people care about the issues – that is true – and that young people voted because they care about the issues – not true. You can care about issues and stay your butt home on the first Tuesday in November, particularly in our communities (young, black, latino, disenfranchised). Because guess what? Young people have always cared about not having clean air to breathe, or money in their pockets, or their loved ones at war. And while yes, the past 8 years have brought us to a boiling point, logic would not tell our communities that voting is the solution. Obama is what made them channel their frustration about the issues onto the ballot. And denying that reality is going to make tomorrow a cold blast of water when we go back to our newly registered voters and find out that they actually know very little about “the issues” or how those issues will really be changed.

Erica's comments are made in response to a specific conference of the Generational Alliance - a coalition of youth-centric organizations focused on electoral politics, policy, and leadership development. I didn't attend that conference so I don't know what specific comments she might be responding to. As such, I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with her here, but I would like to lay out my thinking on the relationship between Obama, policy issues, and increased voter turnout.

First, having worked in cooperation with a number of c4 and 527 groups during the election on their communications, I don't think it would be accurate to say that the message coming out of those organizations - or even any of the major c3s - was that "young people voted on the issues." The major themes coming out of most youth organizations and spokespersons this year were:

• Youth turnout is rising and that growth is a trend not a blip.
• Youth turnout is directly related to the quality and quantity of contacts they receive from campaigns and political organizations (aka - young people will participate if you ask them, and peer to peer engagement is the gold standard for making that ask).

A lot of time was also spent educating reporters about the proper way to interpret the youth turnout numbers on election day and avoid making the same mistakes in their coverage that were made in 2004. We can always have more media hits and more spokespeople on TV, but judging from the quality of stories I've read that echo these main points, I think we did a bang-up job this year in managing the media narrative around the youth vote.

Moving back to the question of whether or not "youth voted on the issues," I think that it's a little harder to disaggregate issues from Obama in the turnout equation than Erica's post suggests. Yes, it is possible to care about the issues and not vote. But those who do vote almost certainly care about the issues. And what exactly does it mean to say that "young people voted because of Obama?"

Nationally, 25% of young people who voted said they were contacted by the Obama campaign. That number climbed as high as 50 or 60% in battleground states. This was the peer to peer campaign (online and offline) that so many of us were pitching in our talking points, and for which we've pushed since early 2003. While I'm a firm believer that the medium (peer contacts, not media buys and robo calls) is more important than the message, these contacts didn't lack in content. They did in fact have a message, and that message was often issue based - touching on higher education costs, the lack of good jobs, the need for a green economy, and the desire to responsibly withdraw from Iraq. On the stump and in the debates, Obama frequently made direct appeals to young voters based on these issues, and on everything from the war to stem cell research young voters were presented with a clear choice between the two candidates.

The media may have lampooned the Obama campaign's celebrity power, but it's not like all these contacts, and all of Obama's stump appearances, amounted to nothing more than a call to "vote for me because I'm awesome." There was a little more substance than that, even if we junkies craved even more substance than was offered. Expecting more than that, I think, is unreasonable. The percentage of voters - among all age groups - who cast their ballots based on the minutia of policy are so small as to be an insignificant portion of the electorate. Using such a standard as a talking point to the media is, I think foolhardy (if in fact that was the message some orgs tried to send), but to rate the quality of youth involvement or the effectiveness of youth organizations on the policy knowledge of the electorate seems unfair.

Bottom line for me - yes they voted because of Obama, but they did so because he invested real resources in reaching out to them and engaging them in a peer to peer manner, and the content of that engagement spoke directly to the issues that are of concern to young people. That's exactly the message that many of us in youth organizing have been trying to get across since 2003.

(It's also worth noting that such young people did, in fact, exist):

Pew Research has a new report: Young Voters in the 2008 Election. The details of the report read like they were ripped right from the blog posts here at Future Majority - I could get used to that.

If you are interested in demographic data on the 2008 youth vote, there's lots of good stuff in the report, including breakouts by income, education, race, religiosity, gender and party ID. The long and short being that, among 18 - 29 year olds, Obama won all racial, gender, and socioeconomic demographics, including white non-college males. The only group that he lost, according to the data, is self-identified young Republicans.

Beyond demographics, there were two findings in the research that I thought were noteworthy in that I hadn't seen them reported anywhere else. The first was this breakdown of the Democratic youth vote margin compared to the overall Democratic vote over the past three decades. We've touched on that data here (see the graphs on the sidebar), though we've never compared them side by side in this format. It really highlights how significant and unusual young voter's support for Obama is historically:

The second item I wanted to highlight, and to my mind the most interesting/new item in the data, is the vast difference in contact rates by the campaigns.

Nationally, 25% of young voters reported being contacted at some point by the Obama campaign, compared to just 13% for John McCain. In crucial swing states, that gap climbed as high as 35%. Back in 2007 and early 2008, I was worried that "maverick" John McCain, ubiquitous guest on the Daily Show, spotted in such movies as Wedding Crashers; a candidate who did quite well in his appearance at the MTV/MySpace Dialogue, would make a play for the youth vote. Maybe it was a function of the youth energy surrounding Obama's campaign by the time McCain emerged from the primaries. Maybe it was a function of McCain's smaller campaign budget and lack of a coherent field operation. But it looks like the Maverick completely ceded the playing field to Sen. Obama when it came to young voters. He didn't even try.

Looking at the contact rates for older cohorts, it looks like McCain had his hands full just trying to compete with Obama among his base - voters over 65 who were the only age demographic to choose him over Sen. Obama.

Pew notes that this disparity in contact rate accounted for a significant difference at the polls, and hits upon one of our favorite talking points here at Future Majority (emphasis mine):

But the electoral influence of young voters also depends on efforts made to mobilize them. According to the exit polls, young voters in key battleground states this year were far more likely to have been contacted by the Obama campaign than by the McCain campaign - and in some states they were more likely than older voters to have been contacted, a significant reversal from past patterns.

Nationally, a quarter of voters (25%) 18-29 say someone contacted them in person or by phone on behalf of the Obama campaign about coming out to vote. By contrast, just 13% were contacted by the McCain campaign. In 2004, nearly the same share of young voters was reached by the Kerry campaign (22%) as was reached by the Bush campaign (19%).

But the disparity was much larger in some of the key battleground states. In Pennsylvania and Nevada, which Obama carried by double-digit margins, more than half of voters under age 30 said they were contacted by the Obama campaign (54% in Pennsylvania and 61% in Nevada). The McCain campaign reached considerably fewer young voters in those states -- 30% in Pennsylvania and 26% in Nevada. Obama's get-out-the-vote operation also reached three times as many young voters as McCain's operation in Indiana (45% vs. 15%) and twice as many in Florida (32% vs. 16%).

The curious thing about the data is that, despite incredibly high contact rates for young voters, major swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida actually saw a significant decline in share among young voters. In those three states - almost the holy trinity of Presidential Politics, youth share of the electorate dropped 4%, 4%, and 3% respectively over 2004 levels.

The most obvious reason I can think of behind this dramatic underperformance is disinterest and disillusionment among young McCain supporters. Lacking any significant contact or encouragement from their candidate - who spent his final weeks on the trail shoring up Red States - perhaps they turned out in far lower numbers than in the more closely contested 2004 race. If those young conservatives sat it out on election day, and older voters turned out in greater numbers than usual, that might account for the rather dramatic decrease in youth share in those states.

Whatever the cause - and I'm sure it is something we'll be returning to again and again in the coming months as more data creeps out - this is great information from PEW proving once again that outreach to young voters works. Not only can it move votes, it can win elections.

The election was seven days ago and I'm starting to get emails from various organizations announcing their victories/contributions. This is not even close to a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of each group, but it's nice to give people a shout out, and it's a good look at what the youth vote world is saying about itself. We will see more rigorous assessments of individual programs as people like David Nickerson, Gerber and Green, etc. start crunching real data. And between now and the inauguration I plan to spend time talking to the major youth groups and writing up individual pieces on each organization's efforts. For now, here's a small taste of what went on in 2008:

Oregon Bus Project

• Bus Project Foundation registered 23,000 new young voters this year, increasing the Oregon youth electorate by 7 percent.
• Bus Trips knocked on over 60,000 doors this year, and is sure to have an impact on Oregon's 2009 legislature. This is double the number of doors per targeted district than in 2006. Quothe a razor's edge state rep candidate today: "I wouldn't be in this race if it weren't for the Bus."
• All told, 7 of the 10 candidates given 1000+ knocks of Bus volunteer support are winning their races, with one more too close to call.
• Trick or Vote was a huge success with 35% of the participants indicating that the event was their first political volunteering experience.
• We know The Bus Federation, working in five western states, has helped reach hundreds of thousands of doors with over 10,000 volunteer engagements.
• The 2009 (Oregon State Legilsative) session will see ten members age 35 and under -- the largest cohort of young legislators in state memory. Of the five new young legislators, two serve on the Bus' board of directors and four have volunteered extensively with the organization.
• After hundreds of thousands of Bus Project "Whole Ballot" contacts - the undervote dropped dramatically. Only 3% fewer votes have been tallied in the incredibly close Merkley v. Smith Senate race than in the historic Presidential race. Compare that to a 14% undervote from the top of the ticket in Merkley's tightly-contested primary race.

Young Democrats

• YDA contacted a record 150,000 young voters in eight key states. Thousands of Young Dems mobilized their peers all over the country.
• Over 1,300 paid canvassers, street teams, and volunteers worked to get out the youth vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.
• Our Young Voter Revolution campaigns targeted young voters and members in all 50 states but focused on Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Utah, and Virginia.

Head Count

• Its 2008 voter registration campaign yielded 105,697 registrations, constituting the largest event-based voter registration campaign in the United States.
• The group more than doubled its voter registration total compared to the previous presidential election by registering voters at more than 1,000 concerts and staging extensive online and college-based initiatives. Of all the voters HeadCount registered this year, over half were age 24 or younger, and three-quarters were under the age of 30, establishing the organization as a leader in galvanizing the
  youth vote.
• HeadCount fielded street teams in over 40 cities and sent volunteers on the road with 10 different concert tours.
• HeadCount registered 53,475 of its total voters at live music events.
• HeadCount worked directly with several colleges and fellow nonprofit organizations to register another 28,598 through co-branded activities. A New York City “Street and Subway Canvass Blitz” staged with partner New York Public Interest Research Group netted 10,161 registrations. An additional 15,546 registrations came from colleges and universities who teamed directly with HeadCount to stage voter registration drives on their campuses.
• The highest number of registrations was generated on the Dave Matthews Band tour – 8,420 in total. Dave Matthews Band’s website and email communication also generated an estimated 10,000 additional online registrations, by far the largest of any HeadCount artist or media partner.
• The artist that helped generate the largest number of registrations per concert was Jack Johnson, averaging 257 registrations at each of his solo concerts (even more at festivals).
• “Touring Teams” traveling with bands racked up over 18,000 new registrations, nearly 40 percent of the concert total.
• HeadCount got more than 50,000 concertgoers and music fans to “Pledge to Vote,” creating a massive database used for Get Out the Vote purposes.

Here's the latest media stories on the youth vote:

• The New York Times ran a big piece in Sunday's paper that in part praised young voters for their participation and influence on the election. It also asked the question "what next?" That's something I'm seeing a lot more of in the second wave of youth vote stories.
• Further examples of that new, "what next/will they stay involved" narrative can be found in these stories from Medill Reports and San Jose Mercury News.
• Another story by the Mercury News looks at how the governing philosophy favored by Millennials influenced their voting habit in this election.
• Luke Russert has a more optimistic - and data-driven - look at the youth turnout phenomenon.
• Campus Politico notes that campus activists are now turning their eyes towards issue advocacy and 2009 races.
• The Arizona Republic reports that the shifting partisan loyalties of the Millennials is putting the GOP in a tough spot.
• The Associated Press says that "young voters have clout, and they used it."
• At WireTap, Biko Baker, the Executive Director of the League of Young Voters, write about how he came to "drink the Obama Kool Aid," and encourages young activists not to let up now that Obama is in office.

If you've read this far, you are obviously looking to find the secret of Obama's success. That claim might be a little overblown, but you should definitely check out these two pieces:

• Ari Melber writes about Obama's email list and calls it "the big stick Obama will carry to Washington."

  Obama's list now tops a whopping ten million people, according to today's Washington Post.

  The article does not directly attribute that figure to anyone. The same paragraph cites "senior aides," however, to report that the list is so financially valuable that it was "briefly offered" as loan "collateral during a cash-flow crunch." A source in a position to know also told me that the email list has reached eleven million people. [...]

  It enables direct communication at a remarkable scale. The next President can instantly address 16 percent of his national supporters, based on the popular vote. To put it another way, the list dwarfs the audience of all the nightly cable news shows combined.

• At TechPresident, Gene Koo looks at how technology beefed up the Obama ground game - particularly in the final week - and takes a guess at how these technologies will transform the ground game in 2010 or 2012.

Sen. Obama's impressive 66 - 32% margin among young voters represents the culmination of 4 years of aggressive youth outreach by progressives aimed at young voters. But it's important to remember that we pretty much ran uncontested in those years. While the conservatives have an impressive leadership pipeline in for the form of groups like the Leadership Institute, YAF, and the Heritage Foundation program, and while I think we've all thrown food at our TV when Jason Mattera's mug came into view, conservatives really didn't have much game when it came to GOTV, and they threw far less muscle into youth GOTV than we did.

That may be about to change. Some of the smartest young operatives in the Republican Party have thrown down the gauntlet, demanding that the GOP modernize and Rebuild the Party. Part of that effort includes upping the ante on young voter outreach:

2008 made one thing clear: if allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years. [...]

At the same time, waiting for a political savior to materialize out of thin air is not an option. Eventually, strong new leaders will emerge. And when they do, they must inherit a party stronger than the one in its current state. Our grassroots must be stronger and more open. We must inspire young leaders to want to run for office as Republicans. [...]

A "40 Under 40" initiative. Undoing the damage to our party's brand among America's youth will take more than new slogans and hip spokespeople. It will mean making young voters the face of the Republican Party, and not just another target group with its own bulleted list of "outreach" talking points. To that end, the next Chairman should commit to a simple goal: working towards a Republican Party where at least 40% of our challenger and open seat candidates for Congress are under 40. Such a party will send a signal to all Americans that the GOP is once again the party of the future.

We can't yet be sure, but it seems likely that young McCain supporters decided to sit out this last election. If Rebuild the Party gains traction within the GOP, that might not be the case in 2010.

Here's a dispatch from Williamsburg, Virginia, by Ben Thacker-Gwaltney, an organizer with the Virginia Organizing Project:

A perfect fall day set the scene for a group of fifty-five volunteers from the a service fraternity at the College of William & Mary this past Saturday. The pledge class from Alpha Phi Omega partnered with the Virginia Organizing Project to deliver door-hangers to over 4500 doors in the Williamsburg area in just three hours. Focusing on neighborhoods of color and low to moderate income communities, the door-hanger encouraged voters to come out on Tuesday and reminded them of poll hours and locations. It also provided the number of the local NAACP office--which is coordinating rides to the polls for the day--plus the election protection number 1-800-OUR-VOTE.

The City of Williamsburg set records this year with new voter registration levels topping 12%, a record for the state of Virginia. Many of those registrations came through the work of students who registered their fellow young people as well as other members of the city community. Working for the Virginia Organizing Project, W&M student Cherie Seise and her three co-interns knocked on almost 10,000 doors over the summer.

African-American neighborhoods all across the region mobilized to get their neighbors to the polls to vote today. VOP partners in the Grove neighborhood recruited a local church to serve as a clearing house for election questions and rides to the polls. Young people from the community distributed over 1,000 door-hangers this past Saturday from the VOP to help crowd the polling places today. Ms. Angela Dennis from Ironbound Square activated their phone tree yesterday. "Yes, we will meet down at the park for a little tea and then all go over to the Recreation Center together," she said.

Check out more stories at http://www.communitychange.org/vote

Young Democrats of America had a scheduled conference call this afternoon on GOTyV strategies and best practices with a special appearance by Sen. Hillary Clinton, and I thought I'd share a bit about what was discussed.

YDA Political Director Tony Cani and YDA Executive Director Alexandra Acker both opened the call by discussing best practices for getting out the youth vote, as well as describing the YDA GOTV efforts in eight states. Both discussed the success of YDA's "Young Voter Revolution" campaign, which has created over 100,000 peer-to-peer contacts so far during this campaign.

The "best practice" emphasized the most was simply engaging friends and neighbors about the election, as each person definitely has the ability to play that part. Cani noted that many activists can get wrapped up in activities on the front lines and in campaign offices and forget about talking to those that are not as involved.

Other best practices included staying away from negative appeals and visualizing/planning the casting of the ballot. Cani noted that Millennials are turned off by language like, "Young people may not usually vote, but..." Instead, to jibe with the Millennials' desire to be a part of something bigger, the current collective participation by this generation should be emphasized. Acker then stepped in to discuss the importance of getting young people to visualize the process of casting a vote. Acker explained that this can be done through vote pledges and probing questions asking youth where they're going to vote, how they're going to get there, and when during the day they will do so. The intention is to assist young voters in planning their day around voting; this has proven to be successful in the past.

YDA officers are currently in eight states: Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, California, Florida, Georgia, Utah, and Virginia. Acker outlined the efforts in a few of the states to give call participants a glimpse into what is happening on the ground.

• California: Local chapters have organized in Northern California to form a collaborative canvassing effort based out of Stockton, largely focused on rural areas. Acker noted that this was yielding the best quantitative results, saying that California's numbers were great and making it hard for any of the other efforts to compete.
• Colorado: The effort out of Boulder may be a bit surprising, Acker noted, because with Boulder containing the University of Colorado, the area is usually known as a "bastion of liberalism" within Colorado. Acker explained that even though this is usually the case, they weren't seeing much partisan activity on the ground. The YDA stepped in to strengthen GOTyV efforts for non-college youth.
• Arkansas and Utah: While neither state has been or will be a player in the presidential campaign, both states have YDA staff on the ground for several local races, in a primarily phone-based operation.

Before Sen. Clinton joined in, Cani reminded callers of YDA's voting reminder text messaging service. Youth can text "Vote Dem" to 35328 and get a reminder to vote on Election Day. Cani referenced the data showing that text message reminders improve turnout by nearly 5% (Mike wrote about this here).

Cani also explained a bit about the activity we would be seeing from YDA after the election. In odd-numbered years, YDA traditionally focuses on issue advocacy programs, and following this cycle, Cani said it wouldn't be any different. YDA will be providing support to Democratic legislators and other influential people by researching a few hand-picked issues deemed priorities by the organization.

Senator Clinton joined in after finishing a campaign event for Democratic candidate Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky. Clinton emphasized the importance of voting down-ballot among youth, pointing out that recent data showed 1 in 5 youth fail to vote in the local elections. Clinton expressed thanks for the support shown to both Sen. Obama's campaign and to her campaign in the primaries, but then said "we're in the World Series now," and that we must execute and get the job done.

Clinton fielded one question from a YDA member -- "What is the best way to keep people involved after the election, especially since we'll need lots of help with the problems we're facing?"

Clinton said that Democrats need an engaged, active Democratic National Committee to reach out to civic clubs in local communities and hold forums on campuses and discuss what the Democrats will be doing to solve the nation's problems. Sen. Clinton also reminded callers of the importance of recruiting good Democratic candidates for 2010 and 2012.

Bumped. --Mike

Election Day is almost here. We’ve knocked on doors, made phone calls, registered thousands of new voters, and participated in the election process of the most important election this country has had since 1932. We’re at the home stretch, but our job is not done yet.

It’s “Get Out the Vote” time, or “GOTV”. For those of you that never heard these terms before, it refers to a category of political activity aimed at increasing the number of votes cast in an election. While we’ve registered voters, educated the public, and campaigned for Barack Obama and our local candidates, we now have to make sure that the people we talked to actually cast a ballot.

So, how do we do that? Well, there are two simple (yet effective) ways for every college democrat to help Get Out the Vote on November 4th, and they’ll only take you a few seconds to do: Sending a text message, and displaying a button.

Text messaging has become an essential tool in the everyday lives of students and is a great medium to communicate. According to results released by the Student PIRGs New Voters Project and CREDO Mobile, in cooperation with the University of Notre Dame, text message reminders sent to young voters on Super Tuesday increased turnout by 4.6 percentage points. And while in New York, Obama is leading McCain by as much as 33%, getting 4.6% more students out to the polls can be make or break for more local candidates.

Reminding a friend to vote at Hofstra University, for example, could be make or break for the great Democratic candidate Kristen McElroy.

So, we need you to Text the Vote on Election Day. We need everyone to find 5 friends, and send them a short message reminding them how important it is to vote, and that every vote counts. This won’t take up very much time, but it will have a major impact on who shows up to vote.

The other way to GOTV is as easy as changing your Facebook picture and status: it’s changing your Facebook and MySpace and other social networking pictures and status. On our website, we have several buttons and pictures for everyone to put up on their profile picture, to remind friends to also vote (You can also find these buttons and pictures on the bottom of this post) It’s very simple, but when friends see that you’ve voted, they’ll be reminded to do the same.

So, feel free to download these images, share with friends, and put up wherever you can!

Here's an interesting writeup in the Washington Post of a 2006 Green and Gerber study showing that public shame may be the highest motivator for civic participation. I'm not kidding.

Here are the results of Gerber and Green's experiment, in which a controlled sample of voters were matched up against groups that received four different messages about an upcoming election:

"These were the most homely pieces of direct mail in the history of direct mail," said Green, who works at Yale University. "They were sheets of computer paper. They had no graphics and used block courier type. They are the exact opposite of the slick four-color mailings that campaigns send out."

Homely though they were, the letters had a powerful effect. The control group's turnout rate was slightly less than 30 percent. Among those who received the "civic pride" letter, turnout was 6 percent higher than the control group's. Among those who were told they were being studied, it was 12 percent higher. Among those who were shown whether they had voted in the previous election, the turnout was 16 percent higher.

And telling people what everyone in the neighborhood had done the previous Election Day -- and letting them know that they would be similarly informed about the current election -- boosted turnout by 27 percent.

Shame and publicity - peer pressure - can be a powerful motivator, it seems. And when the government/campaign/party is going to snitch on you, people get their butts out to vote.

The effectiveness of snitching on neighbors exceeded that of live telephone calls and rivaled that of laborious, face-to-face canvassing, the political scientists wrote in an article published in the American Political Science Review this year. Direct mail costs peanuts compared with other techniques.

Interestingly, Green and Gerber trace the decline in voting among Americans of all ages to the rise of the secret ballot. Their theory: voting used to be a very public and social act. Once those social bonds were severed, turnout declined:

Elections in the mid-19th century were festive affairs, and people gathered to carouse, jostle one another and vote. They sometimes cast their ballots on a stage to cheers and jeers. Voting, even their choice of candidates, used to be extremely public.

A series of progressive reforms in the late 19th century turned voting into a private affair. Campaign operatives were kept clear of polling stations. People got to vote in secret, and few knew whether their neighbors voted.

Turnout plummeted.

What this suggests is that, besides civic pride and political conviction, a central reason people vote is that democratic participation is an intensely social act. Politics, candidates and campaigns offer us zones of connection with other citizens -- even our political opponents. It gives millions of people common topics of conversation.

It's too late to really incorporate this kind of messaging into a campaign, but it raises some interesting possibilities for the 2010 midterms.