Remember will.i.am.’s “Yes We Can” video, the stylized celebrity endorsements of Sen. Barack Obama that swept YouTube earlier this year?
With only a couple of days until the election, it’s beginning to look more like “Yes He Will.” The spark of Obama’s campaign has remained viable throughout this long election cycle, thanks in part to the unprecedented mobilization of the youth vote, which appears to be leaning in his direction.
If Obama wins, he might want to thank the folks at Rock the Vote.
“This year we had the largest youth voter registration drive in the country’s history,” said Heather Smith, executive director of Washington-based Rock the Vote.
The largest on record, she said, was in 2004 when 1.2 million people downloaded a registration form from Rock the Vote. That more than doubled this year to 2.54 million downloads.
Of course, anything can happen on Election Day, but polls indicate these numbers are good for Democrats. A recent CBS News/UWIRE/The Chronicle of Higher Education poll of 25,000 college students in Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania showed more than 60 percent preferred Obama and Joe Biden to John McCain and Sarah Palin. And more than 90 percent said they were planning to vote on Tuesday.
“We do not and will not endorse or support a candidate or political party,” Rock the Vote’s Smith said. “Our mission is to use new technology and pop culture to attract young people to politics that might otherwise not get involved.”
Rock the Vote, founded in 1992, launched a national bus tour on Sept. 13 and has extended it through Election Day to continue educating and encouraging young voters. The swing-state leg of the tour finishes in Denver on Monday with a concert from the Beastie Boys and Tenacious D at the Fillmore Auditorium.
“We actually played a Rock the Vote show in L.A. the year they were founded,” said the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. Ad-Rock. “We’re doing it again because we feel like the whole country is stressing out, regardless of who they’re voting for. And we should be stressed out. In both Bush elections it seemed like the voting process was just so bizarre. Everybody’s thinking, ‘Is this funny stuff going to happen again?’ ”
Horovitz pointed to a sobering statistic from the 2004 election to explain why the Beasties hit the road for Rock the Vote: In 2004, 70 million registered voters didn’t make it to the polls.
“In every election you watch, MTV and the commercials are like, ‘Voting is awesome. Hipsters vote. It’s really cool!’ ” he said. “But if you think your candidate has got it and is going to win, you’re wrong. We can’t let an election as huge as this come down to a few thousand votes,” Horovitz said.
Rock the Vote hopes to build on past successes by continuing to use celebrities and musicians to draw young people to the polls. From Madonna draping herself in an American flag while singing “Vogue” in 1992 to this year’s tours with Vampire Weekend, Sheryl Crow and Santogold, Rock the Vote employs a diverse set of tools.
“In 2004, 82 percent of registered voters under 30 went to the polls, so we know we brought all these new young people in,” Smith said. “There is a ‘ripple-up’ effect when younger voters go the polls. They bring their roommates, their friends, their parents.”
Indeed, when Time magazine declared 2008 “The Year of the Youth Vote,” it attributed Obama’s overwhelming victory in the Iowa caucuses to people under the age of 25. Rock the Vote’s presence was also strong in Denver during the Democratic National Convention, with concerts bringing national and local acts to the stage.
The success of such efforts, however, is difficult to measure. During a Rock the Vote concert at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in August, organizers had to shut down the venue’s bar to force patrons inside the near-empty theater to watch Jakob Dylan’s opening set.
A planned Rock the Vote concert at the Denver Performing Arts Complex sculpture park featuring local acts was moved at the last minute to the Denver skate park in the Central Platte Valley, which affected turnout.
“I think the event was a total flop with a good cause, and if the right people would have been behind it, it would have been cool,” Alan Andrews of the band the Photo Atlas said via e-mail. “Maybe it wasn’t their fault and the venue change really did screw everything up.”
But the larger question over celebrity get-out-the-vote efforts seems to have been answered on a national scale in this election.
“Politics belongs in whatever you’re doing,” said the Beastie Boys’ Horovitz. “If you’re in the spotlight or public eye and you want to say something, you should say it.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
