text messaging

News you can use:

• According to research commissioned by EMILY'S List, Obama leads McCain among women aged 18 - 27 by 30 points (62 - 32%).
• If you haven't seen it already, The Washington Post has a very good piece profiling Tripple O: Obama's Online Operation.
• Allison Fine on why oldschool nonprofits need Millennials, but Millennials don't necessarily need them.
• Rachel Maddow needs help coming up with a name for her new show. Go give her good suggestions.
• Ashwin Madia, one of the youngest congressional candidates in the country, blasts Joe Lieberman on Iraq. Ashwin is one of the young candidates endorsed by the Young Voter PAC.
• Rock the Vote is teaming up with X Box Live to register voters who use the game console. Next time you get booted out of Halo for betraying the jackass flinging insults at you, go to the Dashboard and get your vote on.
• The Commission on Presidential Debates announced the format for each of the three debates. Some free-form discussion periods could be interesting. The internet stuff sounds lame. I'm sticking to my original review: wasted opportunity.
• Heather Smith offers a brief history of Texting in Rock the Vote's voter registration campaigns.
• Howard Dean was in Nevada recently trying to rally young voters around the Democratic Party.
• Check out this widget from Progressive Future. Pretty cool:

In case you missed it . . .

• A loophole in Ohio voting law that will allow for one-stop registration and voting this fall could be a huge boon to Obama (and young voters) in the state.
• Yesterday activists launched a campaign on Facebook against Evan Bayh as the potential VP pick called 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh. You would already know this if you were friends with Future Majority on Facebook.
• Huckabee youth group "Huck's Army" is now recruiting for McCain.
• Future Majority friend, activist, and videographer "noneck" Noel Hidalgo was deported from China this week for filming protests in Tiananmen Square. Noel and his crew might be following me around during the DNC convention producing video for FM. Let's hope it doesn't get quite so dicey in Denver.
• Jared Polis won his primary in Colorado and will go on to become the next Democratic congressman in his district. Not only that, he is the first openly gay candidate elected to congress and he may well be one of - if not the - youngest congressman in the country. I'm proud to have had Jared as a guest in our live blog series. Congrats to him and everyone who worked on the campaign.
• I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but in the next few days, Barack Obama will announce his VP nominee via text message. This was a great idea on their part. They probably received thousands of cell phone numbers that can now be used to get out the vote in November via text.
• The New York Times has more on that in Garret Graff's op-ed about text messaging in the Presidential campaign.
• Blender asked the candidates about their favorite songs. John McCain - what happened to Usher? I thought he was your favorite artist?
• The Washington Post has the skinny on the hottest parties at the DNC.
• In Nevada, a 22 year old is running against an incumbent state Senator who has held office since 14 years before his challenger was born.
• The Wall Street Journal finally picked up on James Fowler's study of the Colbert Bump.
• Generation Vote has a put together a Youth policy platform.
• The Post Chronicle has some thoughts about what Obama's youth supporters need to do post-election day.
• Tom Friedman actually wrote a decent piece about McCain's energy policy.
• It's Getting Hot in Here explains the whole "Gang of 10" energy compromise and why it's a win for Obama.
• David Burstein of 18 in '08 explains the significance of just one vote.
• Medill reports that this may be the geekiest of all conventions.
• Wow:

Rock the Vote has been testing text message reminders and their influence on voter registration. They're finding that, when combined with their online voter registration tool, text message reminders to complete the registration process can boost registration rates by 4%:

Thousands of people download voter registration forms every day from Rock the Vote, but they don't necessarily know the voter registration deadline for their state. We're all busy and it can sometimes take people a few days or weeks before they print and mail the registration form. One of the programs we've been testing during the primaries is the use of text messages to remind young people of their registration deadline. Our early evaluation results indicate that these reminders boosted registration rates of our registrant list by about 4% points!

...

We now have updated voter files for Pennsylvania and Indiana and can evaluate our reminders in those states. In Pennsylvania 68.4% of the treatment group was registered compared to 64.5% of the control group - the text message reminder increased registration rates by about 3.9 percentage points. In Indiana the reminder boosted registration by about 4.1% points. When we combine these two tests and add statistical controls we find that the average increase of 4.1% points is statistically significant, so the increased registration is unlikely to be due to random chance.

It appears that text message voter registration reminders can have a big impact on motivating people to send in their registration forms, presumably because voter registration deadlines are not well-known. This result is in line with related research conducted in 2006 which found that text messages were an effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) tactic - increasing turnout by about 3% points among new registrants.

Update: I've added CIRCLE's results for Maryland.

The results are in from yesterday's Potomac Primary:

In Virginia, young voters made up 14% of the Democratic electorate, up from 8% in 2004. Young voters chose Obama 76 to 24 percent. According to CIRCLE (pdf), 187,682 young voters went to the polls yesterday (Democrat and Republican), a turnout rate of 16%. Turnout for the entire electorate was 26%.

Continuing the trend in turnout, far more young people participated in the Democratic than Republican primary. Youth turnout for Democrats was 134,968, almost triple the 52,714 young voters who participated in the GOP primary. Once again, Republican voters also chose Mike Huckabeee as their candidate, 45 - 39 over John McCain.

In Maryland, the youth vote was 14% of the total Democratic share of the electorate, also up from 8% in 2004. They chose Obama 64 percent to 33 percent. According to CIRCLE (pdf), 137,997 17 - 29 year olds participated in yesterday's primaries, and the youth turnout rate increased to 15 percent, up from 11 percent in 2000.

More than triple the amount of young voters participated in the Democratic Primary as the GOP primary. There were 104,260 18 - 29 year olds who cast their ballot in the Democratic contest compared to just 3,737 for the GOP.

Also of note in Maryland is that progressive netroots candidate Donna Edwards won her primary challenge against incumbent Al Wynn. As Chris Bowers notes over at Open Left:

Huge night for progressive movement: With every precinct coming in with at least a 10% improvement for Edwards over 2006, let me reiterate this point: the new primary voters who are coming out for Barack Obama are also going to result in the first progressive displacement of a centrist, corporate, congressional Democrat via a primary in years. This it it. This is what we have been working for and building for. This is our emerging majority. We finally have the organization, and the voters, and the whole ball of wax. The movement has thoroughly come of age.

Young voters played a part in that.

• The Nation notes the negative impact that complex voter registration laws have on youth turnout.
• The Wall Street Journal makes sense of the race for delegates in the Democratic nominating contest.
• Threat Level, the Wired politics blog, has a great piece in which Sarah Stirland interviews participants in the MTV/MySpace Super Dialogue about how online organizing is changing politics.
• NetSquared interviews Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter about his new book, analyzing best practices in online advocacy. Definitely worth a read.

Update: Welcome TechPresident readers. When you're done here, do also check out Colin Delaney's thoughts on the study over at ePolitics.
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I get really, really annoyed when I get text messages from Barack Obama et al (even though I signed up for them), but it turns out that text messaging actually works as a GOTV tool.

A new study by Working Assets and the Student PIRGS confirms that text message GOTV can increase the youth vote by 4-5%. It's still no replacement for peer to peer contact, but it is sure as hell a lot cheaper.

Here are the major findings of the study:

• Across the board, text message reminders increased the likelihood of an individual voting by 4.2 percentage points.
• Of the different messages tested, a short, to-the-point reminder was most effective, with a boost of nearly 5 percentage points.
• In a follow up survey, 59% of recipients reported that the reminder was helpful, versus only 23% who found it bothersome.
• Hispanics had especially positive feelings about the reminders.
• At just $1.56 per additional vote generated, text messaging was extremely cost effective.

I wonder what it means, exactly, that Hispanics had especially positive feelings. Was their turnout rate even higher? That would make sense. Text messaging was one of the major organizing tools for Hispanic youth during last year's immigration marches. It would be good to see some actual figures, but the link to the full study isn't working properly at the moment.

The link to the full study is now live. See Chris Kennedy's comment below re: the question of Hispanic turnout and receptiveness.

I guess it's time I revisited my previous statements about text messaging as a GOTV tool.

Updates: Two quick updates. First, looks like the Edwards Application is actually a side project of Fred Stutzman of Unit Structures and not an official campaign app. In a very cool note, Fred is open-sourcing his application so anyone can build off of it. Second, I don't mean to imply that the Obama campaign will literally be spamming people with TXT messages, merely that they are using their mobile program as a broadcast tool rather than a targeted, niche tool as I laid out below.
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Obama and Edwards have some new toys for you to play with this week.

OBAMA
Scott Goodstein (who you might remember from such organizations as Punk Voter), writes on the Obama blog to announce the launch of Obama Mobile. My phone is at home (and I'm having lunch in the office), so I tried to sign up via their webpage and got a "service unavailable" message. An inauspicious beginning to a program that I've repeatedly expressed doubts about. Goodstein says:

Millions of Americans relying on cell phones and are cutting the cords to their landlines - so this new service is essential for us to communicate with a growing number of Americans where they’re at.

We will periodically update everyone with campaign updates, local information, public appearances, and other info. We will also use text messaging to ask for your opinions and advice and give you the ability to request information from the campaign.

In addition, I’m excited to announce that our supporters have made a bunch of great free ringtones and wallpaper designs to personalize your mobile phones and show your support.

As you know, I'm skeptical about mobile content in campaigns thus far. The New Politics Institute notes that content is just starting to come into its own, and politics is traditionally far behind the curve, but I just don't see this as the breakout year for mobile organizing in American electoral politics. Maybe in 2012.

Regardless, my take on what Goodstein describes is this: It sounds like the campaign is getting ready to spam news to their supporters. Obama Mobile (like most campaign mobile programs) is a sort of forced RSS straight to your cell phone and you can't avoid the call. This is good for GOTV purposes, but really misses the boat I think for the other 14 months we have left in the campaign cycle.

I can't remember where I read about this, but I heard about a mobile service that you can text in (at anytime) to receive immediate information about local weather. Rather than spam supporters, it would make much more sense to offer services like this through TXT/SMS. For instance, being able to text "obama" to get updates on when he will next be in your area. Or to get 3 short sentences about his position on an issue for those late-night bar debates (Drinking Liberally?) when you can't quite remember what the Senator said about an issue. Haven't we learned any lessons about content distribution from the decline of network television and rise of cable that could be transposed to the mobile market? isn't "niche" the buzz-word du-jour? Campaigns should find a way to make mobile information immediately useful, personally specific, and by request (not forced as part of a mass TXT). This should be a service for supporters, not just a marketing vehicle.

More on Edwards after the jump.

• I’m quoted at length in this Concord Monitor piece about technology and the 2008 election. I’ve become an “expert.” Cool.
• Justin Olberman reports that Hillary Clinton is launching a Text Message program. Like Justin, I cringe at the thought. I’m so not sold on text messaging as a campaign tool yet … I hate spam and cold-calls on my phone, and I really don’t see us figuring out best practices or even getting a critical mass of participants in mobile activism until today’s tweens are in their early twenties.
• Both Rock the Vote and YDA point to this piece on the power of the youth vote in today’s Boston Globe. It’s based on old(ish) data - the Harvard IOP Poll we covered here and here. I think they over-play the Darfur card (again), but its a well done piece none the less and worth a read. I echo Lindsay’s sentiments that it’s nice to see the narrative continue to swing in our favor.
• Finally, looks like the military is cutting off soldier’s access to Web 2.0. Combined with the crackdown on mil-bloggers, what will that mean for the transparency of this war?