SEATTLE — The house lights were down and the air was warm inside a popular Seattle nightclub as the crowd murmured in anticipation of The Cave Singers’ whimsical indie rock.
But when the club’s co-owners came on stage, they introduced not the band but Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire. The crowd applauded loudly; supporters yelled, “Four more years!”
Facing a tough challenge from Republican Dino Rossi, Gregoire was after the votes of young voters energized by the presidential race.
“In the vote in November there are other races than just president of the United States. Vote down the ballot far enough to vote for Gregoire for governor,” she said.
She beat Rossi in 2004’s bitterly contested election by just 133 votes, following three vote tallies and a failed Republican court challenge.
With many young voters expected to cast ballots in the general election because of the presidential race, candidates lower down the ballot are looking for ways to keep them voting once they’ve marked their choice for president.
Typically young voters participate at lower rates than older voters.
“There has to be the perception that the vote matters,” said Todd Donovan, a political scientist at Western Washington University.
Generic get-out-the-vote campaigns, such as MTV’s “Rock the Vote” or the “Vote or Die!” campaign, don’t mobilize young voters very effectively, Donovan said.
So campaigns are engaging young voters in new ways this year.
“Most young people have cell phones. They don’t have land lines, so we won’t be calling them. So we reach them online through Facebook and through the organizations they care about,” said Gregoire’s spokesman Aaron Toso.
Web sites gained prominence in the 2000 presidential election, and blogs became campaign staples in 2004. Online social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace are big this time around. Campaigns and supporters have also used YouTube to spread video of events.
Democrat Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has its own online social networking site, mybarackobama.com, for its supporters, directed by Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook.
The King County Republican Party is working to engage younger voters through its youth coalition, MoveRed.org.
“We organized the youth coalition with zero advertising. We got on Facebook; we got on MySpace. We created pages, we created profiles, and we started finding people who were conservative and started inviting them, and its just grown and grown since then,” said Matthew Lundh, 23, the county party’s political director.
The question is whether that online organization will translate into votes.
“Everybody can have a Facebook account; that’s not going to change my opinion of them,” said Amy Summer, 28, of Seattle. To get her vote, she said, a candidate must “speak to the issues that appeal to me.”
So far, younger voters have voted in higher numbers this election year than in previous years. In 36 Democratic primaries, 14 percent of voters were under 30, according to exit polls conducted for the Associated Press and television networks. That is up from around 10 percent in some Democratic primaries in 2000 and 2004. With a less dramatic nomination race, Republicans didn’t see a similar rise in young voters in their primaries.
“It’s clear that a lot of people are being drawn in, but they aren’t really interested in voting in down-ballot races,” said Michael McDonald of the Brookings Institution and George Mason University.
Voters “roll off” as they go down the ballot, McDonald said. “Dogcatcher doesn’t get as many votes as president.”
Rossi is counting on split-ticket voting, especially from young voters, to win. In Washington, Obama holds a strong lead over Republican Sen. John McCain, according to recent polling. But in 2004, Rossi got 70,000 more votes for governor than George Bush did for president, while Gregoire got almost 137,000 fewer votes than John Kerry.
Rossi is positioning himself as an outsider, reform candidate who understands young voters’ concerns about the future, especially economic ones.
“They really are looking for the next step in their life,” Rossi said. “They want someone who has a rational plan for the future.”
Gregoire, meanwhile, wants to tie Rossi to the Bush administration.
“This is not about outsider/insider,” she said. “This is about change from the failed policies of the Bush administration.”
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