On the heels of the caucus results, where young voters had a large influence on the outcomes, we talked to Kat Barr, Education Director for Rock the Vote and one of the organization’s main bloggers, about what has been changing in youth politics since Rock the Vote opened shop in 1990. Read the interview and peep some Rock the Caucus flickrs after the jump.

P+P: The Iowa numbers regarding young voters are compelling. Stereotypes about civic apathy among young people seem to be exploding. What’s different now?

Kat Barr: Well what we saw in Iowa was part of a larger trend, where voting among young people has been climbing steadily, especially since 2000. In 2004 we had 4.3 million new voters. Then another jump of 1.9 million in 2006. The reasons for this I think are three-fold.

First, the fact is this generation is more engaged in civic life than the generation before, the so-called Gen-Xers of the late eighties and early nineties. The conventional wisdom—the political community wisdom, really—is a holdover from [the nineties] and no longer relevant. This generation is interested in politics, in what’s going on with the world.

You’re talking about like the CIRCLE surveys, which suggest young people may not be watching traditional news programs but that they’re engaged in information on the web and so on, that they volunteer in their communities, that they vote through their consumer choices…

Exactly. Large percentages are engaged. Really it’s a defining characteristic. So that’s the first thing. Second is that, for the 2004 elections, nonpartisan groups have been extremely active, spending something like $40 million altogether to really aggressively reach out to young people. With this generation, it really works. It’s the ask that matters. Maybe it goes both ways, they’re engaged and they’re being engaged. When you ask them to get involved, they do.

It’s a question of threshold—

Yes. Voting for the first time can be pretty daunting. It’s a pretty complex process. There is no training. But, and this goes the the third point, we’ve had pretty exciting elections. There’s no question about that. Wait, I said three, but there’s really four things. The fourth is that the campaigns have been doing a lot of outreach as well, going after young voters more than they have in the past.

So within the larger under-30 demographic, in your experience with Rock the Vote, which has been doing this for almost two decades, are there sub-demographics that are less and more likely to vote. Does Rock the Vote target certain demographics to ramp up success?

The pattern largely corresponds with education. College educated young people are more likely to respond to the campaigns. But we look at young people across the demographics, high school educated kids, rural young people, urban young people…

What has been your most successful strategy lately, would you say?

Primarily it’s been our online voter registration tool. We put up a new version in July and it’s— it’s just great. It’s really to use. It takes maybe ten minutes to download and fill out the form. About 150,000 people have downloaded the form. That’s an amazing number, so many more people than previously… [The online tool] also includes a widget, so anyone can take that and post it to their website, blog, Facebook and MySpace pages. In that way we’ve added to our traditional approach, getting into a peer-to-peer campaign, where, you know, you’re bringing in your friends. If [the widget] is on sites across the web, people are more likely to come across it and respond…

One of the things that seems to have increased to some new level, especially from our perspective, stretching from the sixties, is the relationship between pop culture and politics, where long hair and bell bottoms and the kind of music you listened to were suddenly deeply politicized across the board. Even if you were “dropping out” of mainstream politics, you were making political statements. Rock the Vote has and is tapped into that… How do you see that relationship playing out in campaign politics today?

Definitely that’s there, unquestionably. You see it in fashion choices, music… Issue identification is married increasingly to entertainers, musicians. I mean of course politics is not on everyone’s mind 24-7, like it is for some of us, but research is telling. People identify in clusters, they make identity choices not really in the way political categories break down. You don’t self-identify, say, as a “young white male” but more as “I’m into hip-hop” or whatever. You’re not an “African-American woman” but more “I’m into this music and this fashion” and so on. These behavioral-based identities present us with an opportunity. Entertainment media plays a larger role. It can persuade, motivate. Artists are a huge part of our work. Definitely.

Thoughts on the campaigns post-Iowa?

Just that it’s undeniable that in 2008 young voters are going to play a major part in choosing our next president. The candidates have to ask young people what matters to them. And that’s great.

Tags: 2008, kat barr, rock the vote