RTV President Heather Smith wrote a piece for the Huffington Post challenging the Convention Wisdom that young people don’t vote. While traditional media is saying “of course they won’t”, record turnout in Colorado’s primary shows that when young people’s issues are addressed and when they’re spoken to directly as adults, they will come out to vote.
When we step out of flawed conventional wisdom, we see that movement has happened in this space. In addition to the more than 120,000 young people we’ve already registered at Rock the Vote this year, the DNC has announced that young voters are their primary target demographic this season and are running campaigns using many of the best practices from the youth-vote community (online voter registration, pledge-to-vote commitments, and more), and just this week candidates like Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial hopeful Tom Corbett was making promises to young people that if elected he would work to provide them job opportunities so they don’t have to leave the state to find work. Likewise, young people want to vote, especially those who were not eligible during the ’08 fervor. Consider this post from Baruch college student Xue Yun Gao, who writes after his 18th birthday, “I have always wanted to vote and I regret not being able to vote in the 2008 election. I registered others to vote as my way of [involving] myself in the election.”
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