Because we didn’t try. Now, don’t get me wrong - CRs spent millions of dollars, deployed dozens of full-time organizers, ran innovative online programs, and contacted over 1.5 million Americans by November 4th, but our party as a whole and the conservative movement gave only a passing effort to attract 18-29 year old supporters.

To paint this picture, let me use an example I found that encapsulates much of the problem. In New Hampshire, Dartmouth junior Vanessa Sievers (facebook), who is 20 years old, ran for County Treasurer (NYT) after local Democratic Register of Deeds Bill Sharp came and asked her to run. Take note: a member of a political party (Dem) asking a young person to run for elected office.

Her opponent, 68 year old Republican incumbent Carol Elliott, took the noble stance of calling newly elected Sievers a “teenybopper” and blamed the “brainwashed college kids” for her loss. She went on to say that the “real people” voter for her. This election came down to 586 votes out of 42,000 votes cast in a college town. Sievers’s largest expense was a $51 ad buy…on facebook. While Sievers was looking at the youth vote as a bank of untapped votes, Elliott was thinking of them as a nuisance.

There is another example in this story that illustrates the mentality of many in the party concerning younger people. When asked about the race, the local Republican county chairman gave us these gems (emphasis mine):

“I took advantage of new media, and she did not,” Ms. Sievers said. The county Republican chairman, Ludlow Flower, however, does not think that new media or college students belong in a county race.

“College students are not involved in local things at all,” Mr. Flower said. “They’re only involved in Dartmouth College. They don’t buy property here, they don’t pay taxes here, so they’re not concerned with how the treasury is handled.”

Why don’t we just walk through campus and poke every college student in the eye. Maybe we could single-out the ones that plan on staying in town to raise their families, start their business, and…vote.

There is plenty to talk about when someone asks why we lost the last elections, and I won’t claim to hold all the answers. There isn’t one answer to this problem - it wasn’t the ideology, or just the Internet, or bad marketing. But our party has to be very concerned about the long-term implications of losing any segment of the population by a 2-to-1 margin.

Fortunately, there are some solutions to these problems. For starters, whomever is elected to be the next leadership of the RNC should take a long look at RebuildTheParty.com. If applied to the situation above, the party would have been reaching out to recruit capable and younger candidates for positions all up and down the ticket, just like the Dems did. This isn’t to say that we need to kick out older incumbents to replace them with younger people just for the sake of it - far from it. Where we already hold the seat we should also have been educating our candidates about new technology they could employ to reach new voters and new techniques in grassroots development to turn people out.

RebuildTheParty has some great ideas, and I’ve endorsed them, but something more needs to be done to reach younger voters. The technology will be integral to reaching people in my generation, and it must be built, but in the end it is something that we can hire someone to build. The mentality of the party has to change to recognize young people (and the rest of the grassroots) as valued voters, supporters, and activists.

Recruiting younger candidates to run as challengers is a great start. They will be able to articulate conservative policy positions through the eyes of a younger person, and more ably relate to their peers. But this isn’t something that has to be, or should be, confined to younger candidates. When a congressman visits a VFW or an AARP meeting, they can spew statistics non-stop about how any of their various policy proposals would help middle-aged or older Americans. Then, they drive down the road to the local college and deliver the same talking points. Stop talking about capital gains taxes, and start talking about how higher corporate taxes will prevent all the Finance majors from getting a job when they graduate.

Issues: Talk about regular issues in a way that young people can identify with.

Have a staffer take the extra five minutes to research how many engineers, accountants, or marketing majors wouldn’t have a job out of college if the Dems pass their tax increase. Calculate how many more young people could attend college if even 5-10% of the $700 billion we send overseas every year for foreign oil was instead kept in our economy.

Issues: Make an effort to address issues that young people care about that our not on the regular list of Republican voting issues.

Look, young people think Republicans are old, out of touch, and corrupt. Take on some causes that will show young people we are still paying attention and care about what young people find to be important. While young voters primarily rank the same top issues as regular voters, there are some things like the environment or the accomplishments of President Bush with AIDS in Africa (I bet 1% of young people know anything about that) that would be easy for Republicans to show a little interest in without compromising our principles. We don’t need to flip on global warming as a party. But we should start talking about a “responsible, clean environmental policy” based on “free-market principles”. Who doesn’t want more efficient cars and cleaner burning coal? Well, besides Joe Biden.

We need to re-frame the image of what it means to be a conservative. Use our same principles to craft policy that promotes entrepreneurship (huge numbers of young people want to own their own business), emphasizes personal freedom and individual rights and responsibility, and talk about big and bold solutions to major problems like health care. We need solutions that are consistent with our ideology but also do something to show young people are know they are worried about the problems of the future.

Outreach: Include young organizers in your strategy meetings and conference calls, and hold them accountable for meeting goals.

Take the time to look at your campaign through the eyes of a young voter. Are you doing anything in your messaging, outreach, policy, or culture to make them feel like they are wanted as volunteers or voters? Even better, hire a youth organizer who can do all of this for you and most likely will do it at a pretty steep discount to gain some experience. Having them organize phone banks, walks, events, and online activism will bring resources into the campaign you likely wouldn’t have had otherwise. Plus, some of the things they will do (YouTube videos) will likely help in reaching out to the rest of the voting population.

And don’t just tell them to “Do their best!”. If you do, with little reference point for what is expected, you will get very little. Set ambitious, but reasonable goals that are crafted with their input, but also with campaign needs in mind.

Recognize Our Success: If youth organizers succeed, reward them with more than a standard “thank you” email.

This is something that can be said about the whole grassroots population, but is also specific to young people. Name one 20-something that thinks it’s awesome(!) that they get to hang with people their parent’s age for 10 weeks doing campaign work just to get a thank you note in the mail two weeks after the election is over. How about a thank you dinner, or a personal thank you phone call from the candidate like he/she will surely make to every major donor. These activists put in countless hours, usually without any compensation - they deserve some attention.

I think I have rambled long enough. This will be organized more formally, but this story about the race in New Hampshire just got under my skin and I had to write something.

We lost the youth vote by the widest margin in history, but this generation is not yet gone. We can reposition, reform, and make a comeback starting in 2010, but it will take a concerted effort on behalf of the party’s leadership to get it done. To win races in 10 years, we won’t be able to ignore this generation of voters. We should start trying to win them now.