Come every election cycle, a seemingly endless number of organizations launch programs to mobilize voters. Often, these programs will focus on specific regions or demographics. But one demographic receives only a small amount of outreach: rural youth.
According to research by Clean and Prosperous America, young voters in small towns and rural areas, especially those who are people of color, “tend to attract less attention from federal and state-level candidates and campaigns than other voters, and voters in urban areas.” Turnout among these voters also tends to be lower than that of other groups.
A new fund is aiming to change that. The Rural Youth Voter Fund (RYVF) seeks to mobilize and engage rural youth, particularly BIPOC youth, who tend to be overlooked compared to other groups when it comes to voter engagement. Spearheaded by the Rural Democracy Initiative (RDI), the fund will be made up of a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan organization as well as a 501(c)(4) arm, and will operate in partnership with Clean and Prosperous America (CaPA) and the Movement Voter Project. The c3 will be housed at the Heartland Fund and the c4 will be housed at Rural Victory Fund, both of which are a part of RDI. The fund will officially launch this summer.
As part of its research, CaPA, as well as RDI, found that “rural young people were the most persuadable, the least engaged, and the least likely to turn out,” said Sarah Jaynes, executive director of RDI.
According to Jaynes, CaPA found that there are around 48 million eligible young voters living outside of metro areas. Of those, a full 30 million are considered ambivalent voters, meaning they are either unregistered, infrequent or undecided voters. Only 27% of young rural voters are frequent voters.
The Rural Youth Voter Fund will be focused on year-round civic engagement organizing. According to Jaynes, about 70% of the funding and attention will go to young people of color in rural areas, while the rest is not designated specifically for BIPOC work.
Some of the fund’s grantees include Loud Light, Collective Renaissance Georgia, Maine Youth Power and Poder NC. To date, RYVF has raised about $2 million from individual donors as well as its partner organizations and CaPA’s donors. It plans to start its official fundraising process in May, and hopes to reach between $7 million and $10 million once the program is built out.
Barriers young rural voters face
There are myriad reasons why small-town and rural youth turn out to vote in such small numbers. Research from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) — a nonpartisan research center at the Johnson M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University — found that young people require access and exposure to make sense of election information and how to take action on said information.
“One of the things that we’ve been seeing — and that is through a couple of different studies that we’ve done — is that young people who live in rural areas are even less likely to have the support area in their lives,” said Abby Kiesa, deputy director of CIRCLE.
In a post-2020 election survey of 18- to 29-year-olds, which covered young people who voted and those who didn’t vote, CIRCLE found that many nonvoters didn’t participate because they didn’t know how to register to vote. According to Kiesa, rural youth were three times more likely to say this than their urban counterparts.
“So it’s one thing to know an election is happening, but it’s an entirely different thing to have the support to understand how to participate and how to make sense of the information,” Kiesa said.
CIRCLE coined the term “civic deserts” to describe places that lack opportunities and institutions for civic and political learning and engagement. A 2017 study by CIRCLE found that 60% of rural youths live in a civic desert. During the 2020 election, rural youth voter turnout was about 10 or 11 points lower than turnout from urban youth, according to Kiesa.
“There are still amazing things happening amongst young people in rural areas. They’re just fewer and far between, as well as, you know, in different areas and types of civic engagement. But we fundamentally believe that young people bring value to communities. And that, you know, communities can benefit from young people being engaged,” Kiesa said.
Jaynes noted that a lack of access to broadband and high-quality local news sources, rampant disinformation on digital platforms, voting restriction laws, and little, if any, individualized voter contact all make it far less likely that young rural Americans will show up at the polls. She added that not having voting materials translated into multiple languages is yet another reason for a drop-off in BIPOC civic engagement. Rural youth are also less likely to go to college, meaning fewer opportunities for civic education and to register to vote. Jaynes also noted that it can be challenging to contact young rural voters because they tend to move around a lot.
According to Jaynes, one of most common reasons that rural youths weren’t voting was that they either didn’t have the time to do so or didn’t have enough information.
“You can’t underestimate how important it is for them just to have information about the candidates,”Jaynes said. “Young people don’t vote because they don’t want to make a mistake. They don’t want to vote for the wrong person. And so they just feel like they’re not qualified to have an opinion. So just having the information in front of them… can be really helpful.”
“That’s why the work of the Rural Youth Voter Fund is so important,” Jaynes said. “It’s bridging the gap for people that might not have another place to get that information.”
Strategies for increasing voter turnout
So how, exactly, did the fund come about, and what does its strategy look like? In 2020, CaPA, which seeks to empower young voters to build a healthier climate and economy, saw that rural young people were both persuadable and less engaged, so it teamed up with RDI and funded some of its work.
When CaPA’s founder, David Giuliani, died last year, he left a request that the work of engaging young voters continue, Jaynes said. The two organizations decided to continue working together and brought in the Movement Voter Project as a co-partner.
One of RYVF’s strategies will be to provide rural youth with the information they need to register to vote and to make an informed decision. Some of this work is nonpartisan, and some is not. RYVF’s c3 arm will work on election education and voter registration, while its (c)(4) arm will focus on mobilizing support for progressive candidates.
RYVF plans to start reaching out to rural youth early. “We’re a big proponent of starting in high schools, where people are still congregating before they disperse after graduation,” said Stephanie Johnson, program officer at RDI. “So whether that’s preregistration that you can do in high schools or just civic education… and doing leadership development.”
According to CIRCLE, whose research RDI used to create its approach, another strategy is to support community organizations. These groups can act as resource brokers to young people in rural areas, and their staff and youth leaders can be seen as “trusted messengers” by other young people in the community, which is crucial when it comes to rural voter engagement.
“Rural young people are more likely to be independent and not necessarily identify with a party, and vote for the person, not the party. So we think any strategy will need to focus on issues that matter to them,” Johnson said.
RYVF found that some of the issues that resonate most with young rural Americans are high costs of living, affordable housing, climate change, affordable healthcare, abortion access, LGBTQ equality, corruption and accountability. Research from RuralOrganizing.org has also found that young rural people responded strongly to anticorporate, pro-immigrant and antimonopoly messaging.
Another strategy RYVF plans to employ is to support organizations that use humor to appeal to voters and provide them with information. “This one I think is key for young people… using joy, humor, and not being afraid to be funny, to be weird,” Johnson said. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention social media, of course. That has to be a strategy, but using [it] strategically.”
Johnson said that while many voter outreach programs rely on Facebook, organizations should use other social media platforms like TikTok, Twitch and Instagram to better reach potential young voters. Only 23.8% of all Facebook users in the U.S. are between 25 to 34 years old, and only 18.4% of users are between 18 and 24.
“It’s not just using social media. It’s finding those right messengers… that can reach audiences and entertain people and also deliver good-quality information. It’s a good way to fight back against some of these disinformation narratives that are out there,” Johnson said.
Expanding voter access
As noted earlier, one of the biggest barriers facing young rural voters, especially young rural voters of color, are increasing attempts to restrict voter access. Backed largely by Republican legislators who claim these measures are needed to preserve election integrity, restrictions include voter ID requirements, limits to mail-in voting and voter registration, an insufficient number of ballot drop-off boxes, and banning food and water provisions while waiting in line to vote.
Things like mail-in voting are crucial for rural voters, including young rural voters. “Those are really important in rural areas because, for example, people have to travel long distances to get to the polls, and many young people don’t have access to a car,” Jaynes said. “So how are they going to do that if there’s not a ballot box or if the ability to vote by mail is restricted?”
CIRCLE’S 2022 post-midterm election survey found that in states that eliminated or restricted ballot drop boxes, half as many young voters used them in 2022 than in 2020. Among those who were not registered to vote in 2022, Latino and rural youths were more likely to say that they didn’t know how to register to vote. On the other hand, in states with policies like automatic, same-day and online voter registration, young people were far less likely to say that they ran out of time to register.
Even more significant is that voting restrictions disproportionately affect people of color, meaning that BIPOC rural youth face even greater barriers to voting. Despite popular belief, rural America isn’t all white and conservative. According to the latest Census report, 24% of the rural population are people of color, representing an almost 4% increase since 2010.
Funders like RYVF can help push back against some of these restrictions, but with the large scale of the problem, both to voters in general and to American democracy at large, this is an area that is ripe for philanthropy to increase its support.
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