Candidates

A new bit of research from EMILY's List was released today that shows some details about new registrants and down ballot candidates.

According to their research

"Of the 326,823 newly registered (this year) voters in North Carolina, 176,806 are registered Democrats, just 21,672 are registered Republicans."

But when it comes to down ballot races there is a bit of a disconnect

"65 percent of younger people believe whoever is elected President will make “a lot of difference” in their lives; this number drops to 32 when asked about Governor and 26 percent when asked about Congress"

As such, the research says we risk serious drop off from these new voters for a complete lack of connectivity between them. I don't see any surprises. Thursday I walked around the hill in DC and asked members of Congress about young voters. The video is to come, but Rep. Tim Ryan, one of the youngest members of Congress said it best when he told me that before he ran, young voters didn't really turnout much. But when he ran he made a point to talk to young voters and made a concerted effort to do outreach to young voters. The result? SURPRISE! Youth turnout increased.

If you build it... they will come...

EMILY's List commissioned two pairs of focus groups among young voters in NC. The release says they

"measured the potential impact of various approaches to encourage down ballot voting including (1) linking other candidates to Obama, selling them on the notion that every leader needs a “team” behind him, (2) probing their support for straight party ticket voting, and (3) exploring more comparative approaches where we attack Bush and his downballot allies and remind these voters that Bush may be gone, but his ideas and policies could outlive his administration."

No word on if they thought about maybe just doing more outreach to young voters directly from the local candidates....

The results show, among other things, that "people resist the idea of casting an uninformed vote." This is consistent with our research that shows that the voters paying the most attention also tend to be the most involved.

Further, "straight party ticket voting is not attractive for many in the groups." This is consistent with our research that showed that young people don't find the party system an attractive option in general, which is why new registrants tend to like to be independent or decline to state if given those option. I don't know if these are ok in North Carolina.

"Young people do understand that the other offices are important and have a greater direct impact on their lives. However, this is not a top-of-mind perception among many participants in our groups. As noted above, they know almost nothing about other candidates running for statewide office. . . further, young people understand implicitly that Barack Obama needs a “team” and needs allies down ballot to change the country "

There's more but it goes on for several pages. One of my favorite tid bits was this "Almost everyone in the groups belongs to a social networking site, mostly “Facebook,” and “MySpace,” but they tend to ignore ads on the sites."

I reiterate that the #1 way for candidates to garner youth support this election is to do active outreach on social network sites, with youth targeted field outreach, and candidate outreach. If you or a candidate you know would like to learn how, don't hesitate to contact us.

It turns out that the much-fabled "Colbert Bump" is real. In a paper titled The Colbert bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful Than Truthy (pdf), James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego proves that Democrats appearing on the show receive 44% more money in the month following the appearance than those who do not appear:

As you can see, he also posits a Republican "Colbert Bust," though the data is less reliable.

So much for Nancy Pelosi's suggestion that Democrats stay far away from the Colbert Report.

(Hat Tip Chris Suellentrop)

Update: Because so many people (on MyDD and Kos) have commented, yes, I know that the PEW poll results add up to more than 100%. The poll allowed respondents to choose multiple candidates, making it less a zero-sum contest than a measurement of potential support.
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Young Voter Strategies has compiled some early polls gauging youth support for both the Democratic and Republican contenders for President in 2008. It's still way too early for us to be looking at this as anything more than a snapshot of a still relatively uninformed electorate. But it's interesting none the less in that these polls confound - and confirm - some expectations.

(click to enlarge)

Notables:

• Obama has youth support (no surprise). Two polls show that by 11 points young democratic voters are more likely to support him than the general democratic electorate.
• Despite the runaway buzz about Obama's FaceBook army, Barack is tied with Hillary for support among young voters - 52% or 29% depending on which poll you choose (I'm excluding the RT Strategies poll because it defines "young" as 18-34, well beyond the leading edge of what is considered "Millennial").
• Because it bears repeating, Hillary is tied with Barack?!?!?!
• Edwards seems to be the biggest loser in these polls. Its tough to make comparisons, since the polls vary in how they define "young" and the selection of candidates they offer to respondents, but in no poll does Edwards get more than half the support that Hillary does, and it's almost as bad when you compare him to Barack. And then there is the YVS poll - 6% is crazy low for support among young voters.

I'm guessing that the Obama/Hillary deadheat is most likely due to Clinton's name recognition rather than an indicator of actual support. It's possible that she's running away with young women voters, but this early in the game, all voters are low-information voters, and I think name recognition is probably bootstrapping Clinton into a competitive position.

As an aside, I would like to use these numbers as an excuse to force us all to take a long hard look at using MySpace or FaceBook friends as an indicator of candidate support among the youth vote. Not only are those numbers not tracking with polling, but, as I've argued before, the number of "friends" a candidate currently boasts has little to do with turnout at a caucus or ballot box in 2008. We still need better metrics than "friends" to evaluate the efficacy of social networking as a campaign tool.

As for Edwards, I can think of a lot of reasons for his poor showing - the YVS Poll could be flawed (though that doesn't account for the Pew and RT polls), OneCorp's lackluster online toolset could be turning off young voters, or Obama/Clinton's media domination could be burying him. No matter how you slice it, it's bad. A worst case scenario for the Edwards team would be that OneCorp's service model of campaign organizing isn't connecting with the young voters who would seem to be a natural fit for the Senator's strategy.

Read the full YVS release here (pdf), which includes some head to head match-ups among Democrats and Republicans. (Warning, these match-ups are fun, but have a ginormous margin of error, which is why I'm not blogging them).