Vote block of voters out there, 100 million voters are those who do not go to the polls thati cannot say enough the balance of power in the United States rests in those voters. Nonvoters span every demographic, every racial demographic, age, education. Have iwe are going to hope a very enlightening Panel Discussion discussing with Party Leaders themselves how they plan to appeal to this group and get some of these people to go to the polls. We will also discuss the interesting results of the night study that is being released today. We have all been anticipating for a long time. I want to encourage you all as you follow our discussion to join the conversation on social media. Political elections. Heres a quick video from our sponsor. Theres a crisis facing our democracy. Who has the power to solve it . Is it americas voters, or perhaps its americas nonvoters . In 2016, we witnessed one of our countrys most contentious president ial elections. Donald trump won the presidency , and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. But who did most americans support . Nobody. I am not registered to vote. I havent voted. I do not vote. I dont think im going to vote. Nearly 100 million eligible voters did not vote. This is the story of perhaps the most important voice in america yet to be heard. The 100 million project is a landmark study of 12,000 nonvoters done at unprecedented scale and depth. So who are these 100 million americans . They are as diverse as this country, as different as 100 Million People can be. Many nonvoters lack basic faith in our democratic system. 38 of nonvoters say theyre not confident that elections represent the will of the people. Many believe the system is rigged. Me and my sister always think theres a Conspiracy Theory that it is rigged. I think the whole thing is predetermined. I think it is rigged. Nonvoters engage less with news and feel underinformed on politics, and yet many nonvoters are College Graduates and over onethird are middle class are or wealthier. Democrats, republicans, and independents each make up onethird of nonvoters. Half of respondents reported an unfavorable view of President Trump, 40 favorable, and the rest undecided. In the emerging electorate, 18 to 24yearolds, are less informed, less interested in politics, less likely to vote in 2020 than nonvoters overall. Are we losing a generation of voters . Im not informed on anything, i feel like my vote would be wasted. Being young and voting people will judge you for because you are not educated enough about the whole voting process. Increasing voter turnout isnt just about politics. Its about the future of our democracy. To start the most important conversation of 2020, visit the100million. Org. Please welcome to the stage Senior Vice President and chief Program Officer of the Knight Foundation, sam gill. [applause] sam good morning. Thank you all for coming out. Thank you, politico, for organizing this important conversation. Thank you ed harris for taking time out from apollo 14 to record that introduction. The Knight Foundation is focused on supporting a stronger democracy through more informed , engaged communities, and so led by our director who is here today, we commissioned the survey from bendixenamandi to understand health of our democracy at a time when our political conversation usually focuses on the narrowest slice of voters. While elections may ultimately be about convincing a few, our view is that democracy is about engaging the many. To kick things off today im really delighted to be able to lead a conversation first with fernand amandi who led the project. He runs bendixenamandi which is a legendary south floridabased survey firm. He led election polling at all levels, including president. And also yanna krupnikov, a s are of lyrical signs at suny stony brook and a leading voice on how information influences choices and decisions within democracy. She helped design the survey, helped lead the statistical analysis. Were going to talk a bit about what was surprising or not about what we learned regarding this large voting bloc. Fernand, id like to start with you. Whats the biggest thing that jumps out to you about who the nonvoter is or isnt based on the survey . Myself included, i think all of sam, the amazing thing about a project like this is so many folks, myself included, i think all of us have these preconceived notions about who nonvoters are. Theres all this conventional wisdom that suggest they tend to be of this group and overwhelmingly this. What we found in the study, what the data reveals is they are like everyone in america. In the sense that you run the full breadth of what the american body politic looks like. Yes, there are some deviations from voters and voting behavior in terms of them perhaps a little more minority, little more undereducated, but nonetheless these are groups of people that feel the same way that voters do. In a lot of respects, take the information consumption piece. 82 of voters said that they are following news and information about politics very closely. One would think from a hypothesis level the nonvoters are probably in the 20 percentile range. Granted, they are lower than voters, but 62 in our study say iny are as first versed political issues and political news as many of the people watching on the livestream. And to see that come alive in the data and understand the reasons for why so many of those feel the way do i thought was eyeopening and raises a lot of questions not just about what it means but what any for the democracy as you alluded to. As a political scientist thinking about what we learned about this group through really one of the largest studies ever, whats the mythbusting . This, political scientists have been talking for decades about why people do or dont engage in industrialized democracies. So what conventional wisdom was upended by the survey . One of the tremendous benefits of the survey is that often when we talk to people we ask them to selfreport, whether they are voters or nonvoters, and people have a great incentive to misrepresent what theyre doing. A great benefit of this study is that we knew in advance how often these people had voted so we knew exactly what they bring to the survey. One of the things that emerges from the study is about how people get information. A longstanding theory of Political Science is as long as people get information, maybe not from the news, but from a friend or somebody in the ir network, they are probably going to be ok. But one of the most robust results across a lot of statistical modeling, across a lot of the data is one of the greatest differences between who votes and doesnt vote is whether to get your information directly from the news or whether you try to bump into it from somebody else. And that is a result that holds regardless of a demographic differences, regardless of education, your job, gender, pretty much everything, how you get the news seems to matter quite a lot. Potentially more than we had thought in Political Science. So, given that context, given that this has to do a lot with sort of behaviors that people have, the milieu they are in, fernand, someone who is talking a lot to campaigns and helping campaigns think about how to succeed, we could have highminded ideas about trying to engage anyone. I happen to have those ideas. My foundation has those ideas. Hopefully they are shared here. But well hear later from some of the folks who are focused on this issue of persuasion. In a in a world where the stakes are incredibly high, when it comes to focusing on the few people who are not just bumping into news, who really are junkies, highly engaged, and, therefore, highly persuadable, is there anything we can do to encourage campaigns to actually think about nonvoters as being worth the time, the effort, the investment . Absolutely. And again in the theme of myth busting, the way the Data Destroys a lot of this conventional wisdom, one of the things a lot of people believe or just inherently think about the nonvoters is that it overwhelmingly probably favors one party over another. That if one party were just to overwhelmingly cultivate this group of voters, they would win every election and have a permanent majority, and thats that what we saw in the data. Its actually pretty evenly split. A third of these nonvoters support the Republican Party. The third of these support the democratic party. And a third are in what you might call an independent , perhaps even quasipersuadable mode. What has always been the challenge with nonvoters . Resource limitations. A lot of campaigns and news organizations and outlets say look, its interesting but we just dont have the resources to engage this segment of the electorate. But what i think the study revealed is there is a first mover advantage for these campaigns. Whoever gets to them first might actually enhance their prospects of winning in spite of the fact some people might say dont go after them as much because theyre not likely to vote. If you make an appeal to them, they have shown they have beliefs and strongly held beliefs at that. Just to follow up. Is that something we can expect of a president ial campaign or is this going to have to happen in municipal elections, county elections . Who is going to be willing to say, im going to make a big upfront investment because i think i am activating a constituency that will have a good lifetime value. Its the 64 million question. Campaigns are like the nfl. Whenever theres an innovation in the National Football league, all 31 other teams immediately teams copy. The first campaign, whether its a president ial campaign or becomes the culture in a local municipal campaign, they see there is a pool, properly engage d and activated and sometimes its worth the engagement and they can show that puts them over the top, it might have a force effect that changes the culture of how these nonvoters are engaged. Making this practical as a political scientist, thinking about what it would take whether , its a campaign or social movement, to activate these folks. You already mentioned one of the key factors is whether you actively encounter news or bump into it. We used to have a model where you could kind of do both. It was called the newspaper. Its not as economically viable as it used to be. Something we obviously are working on intensely at the Knight Foundation. In the information environment we live in, one in which we are frankly all increasing bumping into information more, what are some of the more promising levers, areas of behavior that you think campaigns or others, about information or anything , that folks should be focused on based on the survey . One of the things that emerges in a lot of Political Science research, people are more likely to vote when their networks vote. Family, friends, people they work with. And this survey in a sense reinforces these ideas. The people who are not voting feel a certain disengagement from their communities. They are less happy with their lives in general. I think to activate these people , its not necessarily treating them as individuals, but approaching whole communities, engaging whole communities and suggesting to whole communities that have often been disengaged for decades that there is something worthwhile about their voices. And once you get people within a community to encourage each other, that would lead to these networks that political scientists talk of work people encourage each other to vote, to participate, and to even follow the news. There is in some sense privilege that some people have to spend a lot of time following the news, which many just do not. And once we really kind of reinforced Network Effects and reinforce these kind of connections that people might have and use those connections to encourage people to participate politically, i think that would be the most promising avenue for increasing both interest and encourage in turn participation. Some would say, to go deeper on this, that we are in a moment where a lot of the work that bob putnam and others led around urban social Capital Formation from the late 1990s is coming back into vogue as people face the sentiment of disconnection and disengagement whether its with National Politics or in community. Certainly, that school of thought would agree with the sentiment you just espoused. This is about who you know, how you associate with them, the sense that this act is being valorized in your community. Some people say look, the places where that happens are gone. Others would say they are just happening in new places, happening online. Happening through different how in your work thinking, should we be hopeful that we can regain those networks in new places, or is this going to be about rebuilding institutions in communities that are at the very least stressed . I think Research Suggests that we dont need bob putnamstyle bowling leagues to create connections and to create networks. Networks exist all around us. They exist in our families. They still exist in religious communities and certainly online. Theres research to suggest if your online friends report that they vote, youre more likely to do so. So i think the institutions are there. It is just a matter of reaching people who are within these communities who are pressure points within these communities who might actually suggest to their friends and neighbors and families that theres something worthwhile to you being engaged with politics. That its something you should put your time into. Fernand, last word to you. Think about that through sort of a cynical political lens. Is that a message . Is there a message there that a campaign can embrace about this active contribution to community and to democracy . No question. I take a cynical, sometimes political perspective. Ive seen entire president ial campaigns designed around a subgroup of voters in the swing state of florida. Puerto ricans or maybe cubans, a small target pool of voters. These are 100 million americans. They are concentrated in every state. This is an some fringe group. This is not some fringe group. What you need to see, especially in the media fragmentation as we see younger demographics less and less likely engage in traditional media, campaigns and the culture of campaigns need to do a better job meeting these nonvoters where they are. And they are not always on the traditional media websites. They are on gaming platforms, they are watching tv shows that sometimes have nothing to with politics or on the phone, completely isolated from traditional means of dissemination of information. And i think that those campaigns that see it more as an opportunity and the Value Proposition that the opportunity could lead to massive electoral gains, i think that might change the culture, but they have to be willing to make those risks as well. Thank you for leading the study. Thank you for joining us this morning. We really appreciate it. [applause] please welcome back to the stage, politico editoratlarge, peter canellos. [applause] first of all, i want to thank fernand and yanna and sam for that very insightful presentation. I also want to remind people that you can participate in the discussion via politicoelections, and we will be taking some questions via twitter later on. Are here now to talk about where the metal meets the road, so to speak, here where nonvoters and how the Political Parties are going to be contending with this in the 2020 election. Im very honored to be joined , starting on my left, with caroline bye, whos a managing director for morning consult, thats a polling operation that works with politico. It does at surveys. Thank you so much. Matt dailer, the deputy political director of the Republican National committee. Thank you so much for being with us. Kristal knight, political director of priorities usa, a democratic super pac. And doctor Costas Panagopoulos , from Northeastern University in my old stomping grounds of boston. Mattart off, i want to ask a question. The numbers that came out of the knight study actually had some trump. Ws for president and that was that in every swing state with the exception of georgia, there was a plurality of nonvoters who actually supported trump. This was very surprising because those of us who followed follow this issue for a while sort of assumed nonvoters were skewing more liberal. In fact, the nonvoters even more than the voters were actually protrump. So think of a state like arizona, where welltodo suburbanites have been trending a little bit more towards the democrats. There are a lot of people along the border, a lot of guys in pickup trucks who are supporting President Trump, but it turns out they may not be registered or if they are, they may not be voting. How are you going to contend with that abby rnc at the rnc . First of all, not surprised they are all supporting President Trump. But with that, i mean, its very interesting. I look back at this i think of the question like nonvoter, most the room would never understand what that would be like. We are all about politics all the time. We always cant wait to vote because its like our super bowl. So thinking that people who didnt vote and why they did not vote, right . Its the job of the Republican National committee and the Trump Campaign to go out there and find his voters in a state like arizona and figure out what motivates them to turn out to vote. So, luckily we are fortunate to have a huge ground game thats been on the ground for a long time engaging these people right now to figure out why they wont vote, and then how we can motivate them to go vote, deliver a message to them to turn them out. Like i said, we have all this time to do that. On the left right now they are figuring out who the nominee is going to be. We are already to be able to do this, so time is on our side , which is very valuable in politics. Theres been a lot of attention in the last couple of years, republican secretaries of state in some of the