Major gaps remain going into the 2024 elections
A new analysis of action planning during the 2022 elections suggests that action planning worked in the midterms. But major gaps remain in the movement for 100% student voting going into 2024.
More campuses are developing student voting action plans and those campuses have higher voting rates.
In the first installment of our summer State of the Student Vote series, we examined four top 2023 priorities for the nonpartisan student voter engagement movement through the lens of the Student Learn Student Vote Coalition’s annual goals.
With the May release of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge (ALL IN) 2022 Nonpartisan Democratic Engagement Action Plan Report, we now have meaningful insight into the state of these priorities and the role that action planning can play in ensuring the movement for 100% student voter participation is ready for 2024.
Since 2016, ALL IN has supported campuses in developing and implementing nonpartisan democratic engagement action plans alongside many other organizations in the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition. In 2018, seven nonprofit partners and ALL IN came together to develop the Strengthening American Democracy Guide to provide more support and guidance for how campuses can develop strong action plans. Using the accompanying Rubric, ALL IN and Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project have trained over a hundred individuals to review and score campus action plans. These confidential campus action plan scores have allowed ALL IN to evaluate the action planning process and is the basis for the 2022 Action Plan Report. These data represent the best higher education sector-wide summary of campus-level capacity to improve voting rates heading into the 2024 presidential election year.
Action planning can be an impactful tool and process that helps campuses make meaningful gains toward 100% student voter participation. According to ALL IN’s evaluation of campus voting data from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education’s 2020 National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) reports, campuses that submitted a 2020 action plan averaged 3.7 percentage points higher voting rates in 2020 than campuses that received NSLVE data and didn't submit an action plan. Even more encouraging, campuses that have been developing action plans for more than one election cycle had higher 2020 campus voter turnout rates than those for whom the 2020 cycle was their first time writing an action plan, outpacing the average NSLVE campus by 5.2 percentage points.
While action planning worked in 2022 major gaps need to be closed in 2024.
Another positive sign is the growth of action planning over the past six years, with more campuses across all institution types submitting action plans to ALL IN each election cycle and the average action plan score continuing to climb. In 2022, 536 campuses with more than 6.8 million students submitted an action plan to ALL IN. With these promising trends, however, there is still room for improvement, as only 101 community colleges out of a nationwide total of 1038 submitted a 2022 action plan.
ALL IN’s Action Plan Report has several important strategic implications for how organizations in the movement for 100% student voter participation should approach the 2024 elections.
1) Campus recruitment is crucial - and crunch time is now.
One trend apparent throughout the Action Plan Report is the cumulative nature of the impact of nonpartisan democratic engagement action planning. Going through the process meaningfully helps campuses move towards 100% student voter participation. Going through it multiple times, over multiple years, helps even more.
But action planning isn’t usually the first step in a given campus’s democratic engagement journey. According to ALL IN, most campuses that join ALL IN take about a year before they create their first action plan, which ideally would be finalized at least six months before the campus’s next election. It only takes a little back-of-the-napkin math to pinpoint right now as a key window for campuses to join ALL IN or other action-planning coaching programs in order to benefit from them in time for the 2024 elections, placing even more importance on the SLSV goal of recruiting “50 colleges and universities, with a focus on community colleges, minority-serving institutions, and rural campuses that are not currently actively participating in an action-planning coaching program” by December 15.
2) We still have significant knowledge gaps in measuring the causal effects of action planning.
We have significant evidence from academic literature, observational data, and lived experience that action planning increases strategic capacity and expands the implementation of tactics known to increase voter turnout. But without more randomized evaluations of the various components of action planning we cannot easily tease apart which improvements in voter turnout we observe are the result of the action planning as opposed to reflecting the types of campuses that choose to engage in action planning.
The SLSV Coalition and the Student Vote Research Network share a goal to “inspire and support 3-4 research projects to help us better understand the impacts of action planning and various Ask Every Student strategies,” with those efforts focusing on evaluating strategies at community colleges and minority-serving institutions. These research projects will complement the findings of the Action Plan Report, which makes a compelling case for action planning broadly as a tool for growing democratic engagement, but stops short of examining the specific causal aspects of that process.
In other words, the ALL IN action plan report demonstrates the impact of the “what” of action planning, but we still don’t have a full understanding of the “why.” Pinpointing specific successful strategies will fortify not only our knowledge of the action planning process, but future action plans themselves as practitioners and evaluators adapt.
Upcoming research projects funded by the second round of Student Vote Research Network subgrants will address some of these questions. A new research partnership between the p3 Research Lab, the SLSV Coalition, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, and the Campus Vote Project using novel artificial intelligence methods to analyze the text of the plans will also explore this question in new ways. We will share learning and updates as we advance both projects in the coming months!
3) Buy-in from senior campus leaders matters a lot.
One concerning trend - which we will examine in the next installment of this State of the Student Vote summer series - is the 128 campuses that created an action plan in 2020 that did not do one in 2022. Understanding who dropped off and why they stopped action planning is vital to continuing to grow the number of campuses that engage in the process each election cycle.
While much is still unknown about the contexts of the campuses in question, one number that jumped out upon analysis of the Action Plan report was that only 38% of the 128 drop-offs had a campus leader sign the ALL IN Presidents’ Commitment, a pledge signed by 597 college and university presidents to make a visible commitment to reaching full student voter registration and voter participation in all elections. Given that 81% of campuses with Presidents’ Commitment signatories submitted action plans in 2020 and 76% in 2022, there’s a clear correlation that underlines the likely importance of commitment at the highest levels of campus leadership.
The Upshot
The ALL IN Action Plan Report, combined with years of practitioner experience and testimony from campus partners, provides important evidence about the centrality of action planning as tool to build power and turn out student voters in the movement for 100% student voter participation. Accordingly, nonprofit partners are already ramping up coordinated action to support campuses in action plan development, including the SLSV Coalition’s upcoming Action Planning Workshop series planned for later this year.
The next step in action plan research is the search for more specific, causal relationships between strategy and results. Uncovering the “why” behind action planning’s effectiveness could unlock new levels of progress in the student vote movement.