#20 HOW IT'S ACTUALLY DONE: Mobilizing Young Voters
The data below comes from Serbia. The pattern does not. Every campaign I've worked with on four continents has arrived at the same wrong conclusion about young voters, and arrived at it the same way: by putting the money where the campaign staff already spends its own time. The specific numbers here are Serbian, from an Ipsos tracker this July. But the shape of them — a generation gap that runs straight through the middle of the platform mix, and a level of distrust that no amount of reach can buy through — is the same in Nairobi, in Zagreb, in Budapest. What follows is the part most parties skip: reading the numbers before writing the message. “Young people aren't interested in politics or in joining parties.” In Serbian political life that sentence gets delivered with a weary sigh, as a premise nobody expects to change. From experience I know they are interested, and more than campaign headquarters assume. What they won't be is free labor putting up posters, or extras f...