Do you vote?
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The 2008 Obama campaign brought the Internet revo-
lution to American politics. By election night Obama
had 7 million friends on Facebook and 1 million on
MySpace. Some 137,573 followed his every move on
Twitter (“Traveling through PA today & asking folks to
vote for change!”) Obama’s YouTube site logged 15 mil-
lion viewer-hours. Yet this high-tech media blitz had lit-
tle impact on the young voters it was supposed to
mobilize. Fewer than half of the registered voters aged
eighteen to twenty-four cast ballots, an increase of only
2 percent over 2004. And the young-voter turnout
(49 percent) remained below the turnout for all age
groups—64 percent.
By contrast, the political revolution inaugurated by
Andrew Jackson in 1828 energized voters like nothing
before or since. Prior to 1828, only one in four eligible
voters cast ballots on average during a presidential elec-
tion. But Jackson transformed his supporters—called
Jacksonians—into a well-structured Democratic party,
built a rudimentary bureaucracy to manage its affairs,