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Toward the end of the signing, a man approached Levy and asked, "Do you guys have any change-of-address forms for voting?" As Levy began to tell the man that he should dial 296-VOTE to get his change-of-address squared away, Dean stood and made his way over to them. "You guys are registering voters?" Dean said, eyeing the three Young Democrats and their T-shirts. "You're the best. That's dynamite. I can't believe you're registering voters. That's phenomenal."
Registering voters is a goal of the Young Democrats UW, but their prevailing mission is to get already registered young voters to cast a vote on the big day. There are better-funded organizations around the country with similar goals--including Cast the Vote, Rock the Vote, Redeem the Vote, Youth Vote Coalition, Campaign for Young Voters, New Voters Project, Vote Loud, WWE Smackdown Your Vote, Declare Yourself, and MTV's "Choose or Lose" Campaign--but Young Democrats UW departs from these other groups with a message that's aggressive and highly sexualized.
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"We wanted to come up with something that would get our friends and peers to vote, and we thought we could reach out to them and get their attention if we put it in these terms," says Libby Chennell, 18, who designed the T-shirts. She came up with the idea after reading somewhere that women between the ages of 18 and 24 could decide an election if every one of them voted. Most of the people Chennell knows in that age group have told her they don't think their vote matters.
"I cried four years ago when Bush was elected," says Chennell. "I can't wait to lose my voting virginity."
Jonah Disend, president of Redscout, a New York City marketing company that creates branding strategies to appeal to young people, said last week that he hadn't heard of any other political slogans this year that so directly used sex to appeal to potential voters. Stuart Elliott, the advertising columnist for the New York Times, says, "I think it's a very clever approach because sex always sells, particularly to this age group. Invoking the idea of getting your cherry taken may be a pretty compelling argument."
"That T-shirt is fucking awesome," Washington State Democrats press secretary Robert Perez said at an event in front of KeyArena last week, where a group of sign-brandishing demonstrators (including six members of Young Democrats UW, all wearing their T-shirts) lined up in front of a mailbox to send "report cards" to George W. Bush. "I think you're going to see young people turn out for this vote in droves," Perez beamed.
That opinion has some statistical backing. Most likely because of a general surge in voter-turnout messages, 78 percent of college students said in July that they will "definitely" vote in the 2004 presidential election, compared to the 36 percent of college students who answered that question the same way two years ago, according to Harvard University Institute of Politics. In the 2000 presidential election, according to the same source, only 36.1 percent of eligible 18-to-24-year-olds voted.
Jeff Smith, 18, a punk music fan who demonstrated outside KeyArena last week and who will be a freshman at UW this year, plans to join Young Democrats UW because he likes their message. All the Bush-bashing punk concerts he's been to have frustrated him because they haven't stressed the importance of going to the polls in November. "The college demographic has the most apathy out there in terms of voting," he says.
Mike Mahoney, 41, a Democratic volunteer standing nearby, said, "The president surrounds himself with a lot of people, including fundamentalist Christians, who somehow view sex as something that should be kept under wraps and shouldn't be celebrated. Why not make it a part of the political discourse?"
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