Now that the dust is finally beginning to settle after Tuesday's election, it's time to figure out just what exactly happened. Here in Colorado, we know that Democrats lost a few Congressional seats but held onto the US Senate and the Governorship. But the question many are asking is whether the young voter surge from 2008 carried over into the 2010 Midterm Elections. Here's the best answer I have for you: sort of. Or, maybe this one is a little more accurate: they voted when someone was there to ask them to.
We still don't have all of the data we need to give us the full picture, but there are still a few conclusions that we can draw from the data we do have. In a year where young voter turnout nationwide is on track to just barely meet that of the last midterm elections in 2006, Colorado may be the exception.
New Era Colorado registered just over 10,000 young voters statewide this election cycle. These same voters received special attention from New Era: we called them on their cell phones several times leading up to Election Day, sent them text message voting reminders with polling place locations, mailed them back a voter pledge card they had signed months earlier, and even knocked on their apartment doors a few times, including once during our annual costumed Trick or Vote canvass on Halloween night.
Yes, many were annoyed after receiving the fifth form of communication from a New Era volunteer, but most thanked us for giving them the information in an easy, accessible way in a year when nobody else was.
The question we wanted to answer from our program this year was this: Will these young voters that we targeted turn out at higher rates than previous midterm elections? The answer is overwhelmingly yes.
For instance, let's take a look at a few of our most targeted precincts in Boulder County. In precinct 148, the heart of Boulder's University Hill, we saw a 45.5% turnout of registered voters--an incredible 26-point increase from 2006. A similar scenario plays out in our other youth-dense Boulder precincts; precinct 98 increased from 46% to 72% turnout, precinct 100 increased from 51% to 69% turnout, and precinct 102 (the CU dorms) improved from a sad 19% turnout in 2006 to a solid 45% turnout in 2010.
In that last example, precinct 102, all but 7 of the registered voters in the precinct were registered to vote by New Era Colorado.
But, wait--there's a catch. The raw total number of votes that were cast in some of these precincts this year is lower than it was in 2006. The reason for this is because there were fewer eligible registered voters in these precincts in 2010 than there were in 2006--an unfortunate result of the misconception that once a young person was registered to vote in 2008, nothing more needed to be done. In reality, voter registration and youth civic engagement programs need to be multi-cycle efforts to have a long-term impact. We've estimated that at least 45% of young voters in Colorado have moved since the 2008 elections, potentially making their voter registration outdated.
The bottom line is this: young voters can produce a high return on investment. They'll turn out at high rates when we invest in registering them to vote and then subsequently engage them in the electoral process in a meaningful way. What we saw this year was that the young voters New Era registered and encouraged to vote did indeed participate at impressive levels.
And that's the trick. If we want to continue to see young voters participate in our democracy today and in the future, we must keep our end of the deal: the investment. Young voters turned out in record numbers in 2008 because there was a record level of investment. Let's double down on that investment in 2012. Because if there's one thing we learned this year it's this: if you build it, they will come. Let's keep building.