We are often asked whether young people prefer young(er) candidates, and this question is arising again as Sen. Marco Rubio emphasizes his relative youth as a selling point. CIRCLE has now collected evidence–which I find pretty compelling–that the age of a candidate is a very modest factor in influencing young voters, if it matters at all. See “Does the Age of a Presidential Candidate Matter to Young Voters?,” which is new on the CIRCLE website

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The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer [that] has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs.” (For additional coverage, see Jonathan Chait, “The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency” or Graham, “A Quick Guide to the Questions About Clinton Cash.”)

I don’t think the real issue here is potential bribery. According to the federal bribery statute, 18 U.S. Code § 201, “a public official” receives a bribe if she or he, “directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act …”

So bribery would have been committed if the Clinton Foundation accepted money “in return for” some favorable treatment by Secretary Clinton. That is the kind of quid pro quo that the Justice Department alleges in the pending case of Senator Menendez. But it isn’t how things usually work in power politics, and it isn’t the heart of our systemic problems with money in politics.

A New York Times’  news story, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” suggests how things actually work. A financier gives the Clinton Foundation $31.5 million. At an event with Elton John and Shakira to celebrate the gift, Ms. Clinton lauds the donor’s “remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination,” … adding: “I love this guy, and you should, too.” The same financier later on receives US State Department approval for a joint venture with a Russian uranium firm that affects control over this military/strategic commodity.

In a contract-based economy, parties agree to some kind of exchange before the goods, services, or money change hands. That has the advantage of efficiency and reliability. But when it comes to money and politics, such an agreement has the disadvantage of being a felony that can lead to imprisonment of no more than 15 years. There is an alternative, however–the older culture known as a gift economy. In a gift economy, goods circulate because A gives presents to B in the hopes that B will later give favors to A, but A studiously avoids any contract or explicit expectation.

The traditional reason is honor: it’s dishonorable in many societies to expect a return. In the current political environment, honor has the additional buttress of 18 U.S. Code § 201.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial, after raising “questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation,” hastens to acknowledge: “Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton.” However, the editorial warns, “accusations … will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public. [Hillary Clinton] needs to do a lot more, because this problem is not going away.”

I’m actually not sure what Ms. Clinton could do or say that would reduce criticism of the nexus between huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, favorable treatment of its donors by the US government, and personal benefits to the Clinton family. It’s a gift economy, and exhaustive investigation is unlikely to reveal a quid pro quo or lead to any legal action (or legal exoneration).

Donors to the Clinton Foundation don’t necessarily know what they want when they give; they may have a mix of motivations, including altruism. The Clintons don’t take specific actions for donors just because of the money. But they do accept their gifts at glitzy events with Shakira and express their love for the donors. As in Beowulf, “treasures will change hands and each side will treat /the other with gifts; across the gannet’s bath,/ over the broad sea, whorled prows will bring/ presents and tokens” (Heaney trans., lines 1859-63) The public can see what this amounts to, with or without additional disclosures. The question is whether voters should tolerate it.

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The 2016 Democratic nominating contest looks unprecedented so far. The party has neither an incumbent president with a VP already in place, nor a competitive field of potential nominees, each ready to step up if anyone else falters. Instead, the Democrats have one candidate who is so far ahead in her own party’s primary race that she resembles an incumbent president, but no one is obviously ready to replace her should she hit a major obstacle.

By the way, I am not predicting that anything will happen to her. She seems healthy enough, and most of her past has already been relentlessly vetted. But she is human and she could face a crisis in the 19 months before Election Day. Democrats have serious grounds to worry that if something does happen to Clinton, they would be left without a plausible nominee at all.

If, on the other hand, she were to name a VP candidate soon, then a strong replacement would be ready should she have to withdraw for any reason. Meanwhile, she would have a second Democratic heavyweight to campaign with her for 19 months (possibly someone who would otherwise have been a competitor). Finally, the announcement could counteract any drawbacks to Clinton’s candidacy, such as her age and her reputation as a classic insider.

There are obvious drawbacks to naming a VP more than a year before the customary date:

1. It would look arrogant. It would indicate that Clinton thinks she is positioned like an incumbent president. But she could address that impression directly, saying that she learned the hard way in 2008 that her nomination is hardly inevitable. There are other likely Democratic candidates, and she realizes that one of them could defeat her. She has simply chosen to share her VP choice with the public early; other candidates can do the same.

2. She would miss the “bounce” that usually follows a VP announcement roughly five months before the election. That is correct, but it’s called a “bounce” for a reason. It doesn’t last. VP nominations have only mattered in a negative way; a few choices have hurt the ticket on Election Day. No one had gotten a clear benefit that has lasted until November.

3. She might make a bad choice. Her prospective VP might prove a weak candidate or have a major vulnerability. But that would also be a problem if she made the choice in the summer of 2016. There is no substitute for choosing wisely.

Finally, a disclaimer: This is a tactical suggestion. It is not an endorsement. I have serious misgivings about Hillary Clinton and am hoping for a real choice in the primary campaign. Here I simply suggest that it’s in her own interest for Clinton to make a VP choice soon.

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In 2013, we used our own survey data, public data, and a literature review to assemble evidence on the effects of state voting laws on youth. I would say the highlights were:

• For young people without college experience, the existence of a photo ID law in their state predicted lower turnout in 2012, even after we included many other potential explanations in our statistical models. Photo ID requirements may also disenfranchise some eligible college students, but the law did not lower the college student turnout rate appreciably. The overall turnout effects of new photo ID rules were modest in 2o12, but these laws were met with active opposition that year, so their effects may worsen in the future.
• Allowing people to register to vote on the same day that they vote had a positive effect on youth turnout in 2012, and that finding is consistent with previous research on other elections.

We have had another election since 2013 and also seen a lot of new research using historical voting data. I would note these findings:

• Allowing early voting is often thought to increase turnout only among people who are likely to vote anyway, but Ashok, Feder, McGrath, and Hersh find some evidence that young voters who were likely to be targeted by political campaigns in the weeks before the 2012 election (because they lived in high-profile swing states), had higher turnout if they could vote early. The argument here is that young people vote when mobilized, and early voting helps mobilization efforts.
• Citrin, Green, and Levy find that informing minority voters about photo ID requirements raises their turnout (by informing these voters about the process or by making them angry about the potential barrier to their participation). It does not discourage them from voting. This is an argument for getting the word out, as long as photo ID laws are on the books. It is also a warning that photo ID laws may have worse suppressive power once the salience of these now-controversial laws declines.
• Another policy option is to allow 16- or 17-year-olds to preregister, so that they are automatically registered on their 18th birthday. That reform has the advantage of allowing outreach to occur in schools and gets youth on the rolls at the earliest possible opportunity. The sooner a young person is registered, the sooner she can be canvassed and mobilized by parties. Holbein and Hillygus find that preregistration boosts youth turnout, and they find that the youth electorate diversifies, so that Republicans do better than they would if turnout were lower.
• Keith Gunnar Bentele and Erin O’Brien argue that states are more likely to impose restrictive voting measures if they have higher minority populations, higher and/or rising minority turnout, and if the state is both competitive and has a Republican legislative majority. This is circumstantial empirical evidence in favor of the view that these restrictions have partisan motivations.

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The first youth poll of the 2016 election is out, and it appears to be solid methodologically, with a phone sample and 1,000 respondents (up to age 34). It’s from Fusion. I am not interested in the young adults’ preference among the presidential candidates, because now is way too early to be forecasting the election. (For the record, young adults prefer Hillary right now.) But I am interested in these nuggets:

Party and ideology: The biggest group is composed of Independents (46%), but when you ask which way people “lean,” the results are 43% Democrats and 31% Republicans. (Most political science research finds that Independent leaners behave exactly like party members.) Fifty-seven percent say government is “helpful,” much higher than the national rate and a sign of a persistent Democratic tilt. About two thirds say they belong to the same party as their parents. It looks as if the remaining third has mostly shifted left of their older relatives.

Knowledge: Only 23% of respondents can name one of their US Senators. The rates are 20% for women, 18% for 18- to 24-year-olds, 16% for Latinos, and 10 percent for African-Americans. This is a form of political knowledge that I would really like to be higher. If you don’t know who represents you, you are not able to hold your representatives accountable. Note that this is a distinct problem from the scores on civics exams, because standardized tests never ask about current facts like the names of one’s elected officials. If we were guided by standardized test scores, we would spend less time on current events, not more time.

Issues: The top issue is the usual–“jobs and the economy”–at 19%. Health care follows at 10%, and education, at 7%. Police brutality is the top issue for 1%, as is racial harmony. Climate change is also at 1%. The most striking finding here is the wide dispersal of top issues. As I often note, young adults are not an interest group. They do not have one or a few defining issues. They face all the issues that confront us as human beings, from taxes (1%) to immigration (4%).

Age of candidates: We are often asked whether young voters prefer younger candidates. That question will come up again if Hilary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. For what it’s worth, this survey asked whether respondents would be more likely to vote “if there were more young candidates.” Seventy percent thought it would make no difference. Twenty-six percent saw it as a positive change, and 6% thought they would be less likely to vote if there were more young candidates.

Comedy: And if comedians ran for president, the leading candidate among young adults would be Colbert, followed pretty closely by Stewart and Fay.

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It is widely held that if a person votes three times in a row for a given party, she will always vote for that party. (For instance, a CNN “Election Night” segment in 2012 began with that explicit premise). The implication is causal: voting the same way three times makes the person a lifelong Democrat or Republican.

I have not been able to chase down the evidence for this claim in the form of quantitative social science. I admit that I have not searched intensively and may have missed the source. The seminal study by Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes, The American Voter (1960), found a lot of stability in individuals’ partisan identification but devoted a whole section (pp. 149ff.) to “fluctuations in party identification,” which were pretty common. Nearly 40 years later, a sophisticated and well-annotated study like David O. Sears and Carolyn L. Funk, “Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults’ Political Predispositions” (Journal of Politics 61/1) neither mentions nor supports the “three-times-and-you’re hooked” thesis. These authors find a high degree of stability in partisan preference but much variation, and no magic number of three elections in a row. Both studies (and several others that I reviewed this morning) find that events can change people’s prior voting habits.

The claim has been made for many decades, at least by pundits and political consultants. Thus, if it has any validity at all, it must derive from an era when parties were very different from our parties today. Hence I am highly skeptical that the causal version of the theory will apply in the 21st century–even if it did in the 20th. It will be decades before we know for sure, but I doubt that partisan voting is now habitual.

Parties have changed in two fundamental and pertinent ways. First, until the 1970s, US political parties were ideologically incoherent coalitions of demographic groups. For instance, white Mississippians and Jewish-Americans from Brooklyn both voted solidly Democratic, even though they disagreed with each other on almost every contested issue. As long as a party’s positions were unpredictable and contested, but demographic groups had strong partisan loyalties, then it made sense that people would vote consistently for the party of their heritage. Casting three consecutive votes for the same party did not make people Democrats or Republicans or solidify their identities. It reflected their foreordained commitments.

Now that parties are ideologically coherent, people will still vote consistently if they are strong liberals or strong conservatives. But if they change their views, or hold mixed views, or fall near the ideological center, they may switch allegiances. We will still see a common pattern of consecutive votes for the same party, but it will not be causal. It will reflect relatively durable ideological positions.

The other important change is in the structure of parties. They used to be genuine associations, with ward leaders, county officers, and frequent face-to-face meetings. Now they are (mostly) designations that we select when we register. It seems plausible that joining an association would have influence. If you not only voted three times in a row for Republicans but also formed human connections to local Republican activists, that might indeed cause you to stick with the party. But if there are no local human connections within the party structure, that influence is gone.

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