blueprints
The First Years Out
Youth Movement
Young voters reach out to campaigns
with technology, and vice versa
COURTESY RACHEL MILLS ’ 97
An earnest and attractive young woman with
long, dark hair and a telephone headset leans
toward the video camera.
“Hi, Internet,” she says. “My name is Rachel, and
I’m a junkie … a Ron Paul junkie.” In the You Tube
video Rachel Mills ’ 97 made to show her support for
the Republican presidential candidate, she describes
watching his performance in a South Carolina debate.
She pauses and looks away for a second, as if struggling
to describe her experience.
“And I don’t know, ever
since then, I’m just totally
hooked. It’s like a drug. I
just can’t stop searching the
Internet for Ron Paul news
and posts and discussion
and activities and things. …
I haven’t been able to watch
the television for days,
because they’re just frankly
not discussing him on the
mainstream media. So, yeah,
the Internet is where I got
to be.”
It’s no secret that young
voters have been a potent
force in this year’s presidential primaries or that campaigns — and individual
activists — have turned to
Internet-based tools such as
blogs, You Tube, MySpace,
Facebook and others to court them. It’s proven to be
an effective strategy. Mills’ homemade video got more
than 90,000 views at last count — and in August 2007
it got Mills a job as press secretary in Paul’s congressional office.
In many states, voters under 30 years old have been
turning out for primaries in numbers not seen for
years. Several analysts, among them School of Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Leroy Towns,
attribute Democrat Barack Obama’s success in the primaries at least in part to his overwhelming support
Her passion for Ron
Paul’s presidential
campaign, expressed
in a You Tube video,
led to a job for
Rachel Mills ’ 97 as
press secretary in his
congressional office.
among young voters.
The nationwide upswing in political engagement
among young adults began in 2002 and increased
sharply this year. The Pew Research Center and others
have reported that, due in part to stepped-up registration and get-out-the-vote drives, all age groups showed
higher voter participation in the past two election
cycles. But voters under 30 have shown the sharpest
increase in turnout — and they’re tending increasingly
to consider themselves liberal and to vote Democratic.
Towns — a former reporter, chief of staff for Kansas
Sen. Pat Roberts and press secretary for Kansas Gov.
Robert F. Bennett, both Republicans — says this trend
is certainly true among his students, some of whom
supported former U.S. Sen. John Edwards ’ 77 (JD) of
Chapel Hill when he was running for president and
almost all of whom moved on to support Obama
when Edwards dropped out.
“They consider this their time in politics,” Towns
says of his students, noting that Obama’s message of
change has particular resonance with young people.
“They’re not only eager to get out and register and
vote, they’re getting involved.”
Carolina’s recent alumni are displaying considerable
involvement, too. One example is Derwin Dubose ’06,
who worked for two years coordinating the state
Democratic Party’s efforts to reach several groups of
constituents, including young voters. He has since
moved on to work as a fundraiser for the Ronald
McDonald House of Durham, but he still volunteers
for campaigns. Before the Ohio primary in March, he
and two friends from Carolina drove for 11 hours to
canvass for Obama in Akron.
“We got in early on a Thursday morning, about 4
a.m., reported to work at 9 a.m., got a list and started
going door-to-door,” he recalls. It was snowing, and
they were concerned their Southern accents might
make them seem out of place. But, he says: “It was
phenomenal. People responded well. No matter who
they were voting for in the primary, they wanted to
engage us in conversation. They were impressed and
sympathetic we’d traveled so far to talk with them.”
Since then, Dubose has made phone calls for
Obama and volunteered for the state party’s annual Jef-ferson-Jackson Dinner. Though he has taken part in
traditional door-to-door, face-to-face contact, Dubose
has also seen firsthand the effect of new technologies
