Background

The Obama campaign knew it had a lot of support from young Americans, but history has shown it’s difficult to get young voters to the polls.

The campaign wanted to make it easy for college-age voters to cast their ballots. The Obama Campaign took the initiative in Nevada to motivate young people and get them to vote.

In an effort to increase young voter participation in Nevada, we established early voting programs on several college campuses. We developed an automated calling program for the Obama campaign to alert students at these colleges about the campus early vote locations and times. We also tailored the program so the students could opt in to further communications from the campaign via email, text message, or both. Communication via text message and email is an emerging technology within the realm of campaigning, but we knew that this would very likely be the most effective way of reaching young people because they are such a technology-based population.

We ran these programs on the University of Nevada’s Reno and Las Vegas campuses, stressing the importance of the upcoming election, motivating the students to vote. Steve George from Nevada’s Secretary of State office remarked “Nevada has seen a significant increase in efforts to register young voters, and we believe these efforts are changing the profile of the Nevada electorate…this is going to make a significant difference…”

George was right; making students aware of the option of early voting by electronic communication paid off as young people came out to vote in higher numbers than ever before, representing almost 17% of total Nevada voters. The Democratic vote went up 13% from the 2004 election.

Because we involved students with the campaign by staying in touch via text messaging and email, the students remained informed on the upcoming election and made it a priority to vote. With a strong showing from young supporters, Obama and Biden won Nevada by a comfortable margin.