With over 66 million people already casting votes for the 2020 presidential election, there is still a last minute push for college students to turn out on Election Day.
The Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaigns are taking place across the nation, with organizations texting and calling young voters and encouraging them to head to the polls on Tuesday.
According to Pew Research Center, Generation Z voters will make up one in ten eligible voters for the 2020 election.
Tiffany Dena Loftin, the national director for the youth and college division at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NACCP) — the nation’s oldest civil rights organization — said that the organization has been canvassing, phone banking and texting young voters. The strategy, she said, has proven successful. More than 17 million people have been texted, and 82,000 phone calls have been made across the nation to encourage those of voting age to cast their ballot by Tuesday.
With 25,000 members in the youth college division and over 360 chapters around the country, the GOTV efforts are two-fold, Loftin explained. Youth members under the age of 18 are part of the ‘Vote for Me’ program in which they find cohorts of young people (who are not yet of voting age) to join them and mobilize the older generation to vote for them.
Students and youth who are 18 and up have created voter registration events online as well. For them, a creative outreach strategy includes ‘Netflix and Chill’ parities, where students host movies virtually and post the voter registration link in the chat.
She said that 15,000 young people have been trained to do civic engagement as part of the “electoral strategy work.”
