The most clear trend in the Presidential primaries is that the youth vote is going to have a huge impact on the election. Here’s Declare Yourself.com, founded by Norman Lear in 2003, showing exactly how to use social media for election impact. Declare Yourself has teamed up with MySpace and organizations including Cricket Wireless, Yahoo!, Google, Evite, UWIRE, Good Magazine, Clear Channel, Comedy Central, American Eagle, Harper Collins, Starbucks, and Voto Latino.
Here, Superbad’s McLovin’ (a.k.a. Chris Mintz-Plasse) invites you to watch…as he registers to vote. The video’s been downloaded 600,000 times so far.
Declare Yourself helps young voters make their voices heard by registering, educating themselves on the issues, and voting.
“Our goal,” says Lear, “is to register 300,000 new voters before the 2008 presidential primary season and two million new voters by the 2008 presidential election.”
Declare Yourself registered 1.2 million young voters in the 2004 campaign, helping raise participation from 18-to-25-year-olds by 11 percent over the 2000 election. Still, in 2004, only 47 percent of 18-to-25-year-old citizens voted, compared to 66 percent of citizens over 25.
Rock on!
Hat tip to Media Post
The idea is great, partnering all those organizations is crucial, and getting “McLovin” is probably what generated a good deal of the buzz, but am i the only one who thinks the video itself isn’t all that good? The goal is to generate buzz around your campaign and drive voting, so in that they were successful, but i still feel the video leaves something to be desired. IMHO it wasn’t as funny, informational, creative, etc as it could have been.
Thanks for posting the video! We have seen an enormous surge in traffic due in large part to this video, along with some others that can be viewed on our website, http://www.declareyourself.com. More should be released shortly, and despite the mixed reviews about the content, they are certainly helping us reach out to the young registered and unregistered voters of this country.