By Paul Loeb
When my son went off to college, he didn’t know how to make new friends. He’d hung out for years with the same group he met in second grade. Six months in, he still hadn’t shared a meal with anyone new. So I called campus housing and asked to talk with an RA in his hall. After they connected me, I asked if they could subtly make some introductions, perhaps to some other socially awkward young men who could similarly use friends. I met some of those people at his wedding, and he now has three young kids of his own.
Knowing that residence halls provide community, how can that community help students not only make friends but also participate in an election where the dominant sentiment, especially among young voters, seems to be “I hate them all”? That is one of the goals of my organization, guides.vote, which works to provide clear, insightful, and well-sourced nonpartisan information on candidate positions to young voters.
We can start with residence halls as safe spaces. Campuses can be overwhelming, but residence halls can be havens, especially for students who’ve just left home. Students often know their hall neighbors more than they know students in their classes and spend more time with them; when they get important information in this familiar context, they’re likely to trust it.
But even for critical electoral choices like those on the horizon, it will take intentional effort to pull them away from their screens and connect them with information that isn’t algorithmically generated – and even more so to have them consider viewpoints that aren’t their own. In an election that will decide so much of their future, reflex cynicism places them at risk of staying home. In a study conducted by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) on youth who didn’t vote in 2022, 53% said it was because they didn’t have enough information or didn’t think their votes mattered.
In 2012, I was working on another project to help students vote. Higher education institutions asked us if we could create nonpartisan candidate guides for the students, since the existing ones were too long to read and students wanted something concise and accessible. In response, we created side-by-side comparisons that quickly became favorites of the schools. Campus partners said they got students past the myth that candidates were just all the same. They praised them more than any other resource we provided.
We’d originally envisioned the guides as helping students decide in the voting booths between the choices. Within a year, campus partners said that was important but that the bigger impact was getting students to vote at all. At the same time, other groups were also beginning to use the guides. So, in 2022, we then spun them off into the new guides.vote project. Community groups from the NAACP to Nonprofit Vote and Vote.org have become major partners. However, campuses remain a central focus of our work, as guides are distributed by partners like All In Challenge, Andrew Goodman Foundation, Campus Compact, Campus Vote Project, and the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition (SLSV). In the most recent Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School survey of 18-29-year-olds, 63% of those on the fence about voting said nonpartisan guides would help.
We’re creating 2024 guides in English and Spanish for 70 major races, headlined by the Presidential Guide. There is also guidance to help students learn to spot misinformation. We have created a number of resources to help campuses discover the best way to distribute the information. We offer materials that can be distributed through email and social media and banners that can be placed in high-traffic areas, and the guides can be adapted to create bulletin boards. Some campuses even host what we call dorm storms, where student groups print off PDFs from the website and go door-to-door.
We also offer advice to help facilitate productive conversations. (Not everyone on campus is as adept with that as I’ve seen residence life staff be.) College is an ideal time to learn how to have conversations about and across difference. But this doesn’t always happen organically. Because our guides are politically neutral and based on issues that students care about, they’re perfect resources to facilitate talking through their feelings on voting and the candidates. The guides, for instance, could be paired with the Living Room Conversations templates for conversations on difficult issues, including those on voting. The guides can also play a critical role in students’ own informal conversations with peers, grounding their arguments in concrete candidate positions.
You’ll probably think of other approaches, but what’s key is your power to help students vote, whoever they choose to support. If this can be done while building on relationships of friendship and trust, you can empower them to play a key role in shaping their future.
Paul Loeb is the founder of guides.vote, a national nonpartisan effort to give voters concise and accurate information on where candidates stand. Before that, he founded the Campus Election Engagement Project and authored Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While. For questions on using the guides, contact Campus Director Claire Adams.