The 2008 presidential election brought to light the power of the youth voting block as young, first-time voters helped usher in the historic election of the nation’s first African American President. Subsequently, the youth vote has plummeted, with 2014 seeing a historic low. Oakland Rising is teaming up with other civic engagement groups in California as part of the Youth Voter Engagement Project to turn this trend around. With a goal of collectively contacting 73,360 young voters of color and ID’ing 46,162 as committed to voting, the Youth Vote (YVote) program utilizes three key elements:

– Voter registration
– Digital organizing
– Direct voter contact

Voter registration:
Our voter registration campaign began in August and runs through September, targeting community colleges, elementary school student pick-up times, job fairs, high profile and grassroots community events, and concerts as part of our effort to register more young people to vote. We expect to register 1,530 voters, with at least 50% of them being young voters.

Digital organizing:
As a way to more deeply engage youth, our digital organizing toolbox will include the Hustle app for personalized mass texting, customized memes, and social media outreach such as Facebook Live, Twitter, and Instagram. The Hustle app rose to stardom after the Bernie Sanders campaign successfully used it to connect with millions of young supporters via personalized text messaging. We will be Hustling several thousand young voters to make sure they vote this November. Every week through November 8th, we are tweeting and posting multiple memes on Facebook that will be repeated for maximum effect and will include shares from our partners in Y Vote.

Direct voter contact:
We will be contacting approximately 5,000 young voters ages 18-34 as part of our voter outreach program through California Calls. In addition to our Daily Team of 44 voter outreach workers, we will engage 110 volunteers as another layer of our door-to-door outreach. We will experiment with talking points specifically to persuade young voters to turn out on these measures, as well as with our GOTV messages.