Coming soon to a battleground state near you: White House campaigns combining census reports with Instagram and Twitter posts to target teenagers who aren’t yet 18 but will be by Election Day 2016.

It’s an aggressive strategy with an obvious reward. More than eight million people will become legal adults eligible to vote for the first time by the next general election. Campaigns are eager to find ways to get through to these 16- and 17-year-olds who are still minors and, in most cases, more likely to be concerned with making it to class on time than who should be elected president.


“It’s got to be the right candidate with the right message to excite and motivate that age demographic, with so many distractions in their life, to register, and then turn out,” said Vincent Harris, digital director for Rand Paul’s political operation.

Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans are desperate for any edge at the polls, and they say they’ll be employing 21st-century data mining techniques in search of supporters from this ripe demographic that has little or no track record in politics. That means scouring local high school directories from Iowa to Florida, matching up data from public voter rolls with parents’ voting histories, and picking through whatever scant bits of consumer information are also available to help paint a sharper picture of the electorate.

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Privacy activists and policymakers express deep qualms about letting political campaigns have free rein to target future voters before they’ve become legal adults. They say teenagers lack the proper context and experience to make sense of so many brass-knuckle attack ads on complicated issues ranging from the federal deficit to terrorism. Civic-minded efforts to encourage youth turnout can come close to crossing the line too, including a viral Rock the Vote video on which rapper Lil Jon said his reason for casting a ballot in 2014 was to legalize marijuana, and a Koch Brothers-affiliated Generation Opportunity commercial that used a particularly scary Uncle Sam mask to urge young women to opt out of Obamacare. Making data on young voters publicly available also opens them up not just to messages from Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, but from anyone else who wants to contact kids online.

“You want your 16-year-old daughter’s name and address on the web in this world?” said Vicki Berger, a retiring Oregon state representative who has tried to restrict the public release of teenagers’ personal data when they pre-register to vote in her state before they turn 18. She warns that the information could end up in the hands of “pedophiles and people preying on young girls.”

Beyond the privacy issues associated with targeting minors, campaigns face other serious questions about whether it’s even worth the time and money to make a play for the youngest of young voters. Only half of the 18-29 set actually turned out for the 2012 election. Logistically, just keeping tabs on these teenagers is a headache considering many will be leaving their parents’ homes and heading off to college in a different state or congressional district right around the same time the two parties are holding their national political conventions.

But the payoff is also almost too big to ignore. President Barack Obama demonstrated in 2008 and 2012 how the youth vote can be a key ingredient in building a winning coalition. His volunteers set up shop across the street from high school graduation ceremonies to register new voters and used student volunteers to hound classmates. If Mitt Romney had just split the youth vote with Obama, he would be president right now, according to a Tufts University analysis.

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The Republican National Committee senses an opportunity. The next generation of first-time voters were still in grade school when Obama won his first term and have approached legal voting age during a time of deep economic uncertainty. Recognizing the rich vein of potential support, GOP data teams are creating comprehensive files on teenagers as part of a large scale effort to deduce the political DNA of some 200 million Americans.

“This and voter registration are priorities and what we’re already looking to get on voters,” said RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski. “Frankly, it’s a huge opportunity for us with the youth turning away from Obama and the Democrats the way we’ve seen lately.”

Paul strategists see young voters as viable targets thanks in part to the libertarian stances the Kentucky Republican has taken on National Security Agency surveillance and drug policy. It won’t be the first group he goes after if he runs for president — that would be people with proven track records voting in primaries. But it is an avenue the senator is ready to explore.

“Campaigns will certainly reach out to those voters, but they are oft-discussed in the media and rarely show up to vote,” Harris said. “Perhaps online offers an ability to group them into some younger voter targeting and to run some specific messages to register and get out to vote, but it would take a unique candidate such as Rand Paul to really get that age demographic excited.”

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The goal is to figure out which young voters “would have to be motivated enough in Iowa to say spend time at a caucus location for a candidate versus out with a friend at a bar or on a Tinder date,” Harris added.

While Hillary Clinton will be challenged to generate the same level of excitement among the younger crowd as Obama, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner’s backers say they will try to find new ways to win over the 16- and 17-year-old set. Ready for Hillary, the super PAC that plans to hand over to a future Clinton campaign an email list with about 3 million addresses, “is engaging anyone between the age of 16 and whenever you stop considering yourself a young professional,” said a Democratic source close to the group.

But campaigns aren’t just waiting for teenagers to contact them directly. They can buy the public voter rolls in at least 11 states — Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon, Texas and West Virginia — that contain data on people younger than 18 who have pre-registered to vote for the next election. The amount of information on each voter varies by state but typically includes a full name, address, date of birth and, when available, party affiliation.

Political campaigns take that public information and start creating dossiers on future voters, folding in census information, their parents’ voting histories, club memberships and whatever additional consumer data is available on 16- and 17-year-olds. While teenagers rarely have their own credit cards or grocery store loyalty cards not tied with their parents, there is still plenty of unregulated information available for a campaign to harvest, from college survey preferences to insights supplied on social media on everything from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter.

“We absolutely will cull the information on who those newly registered voters are and begin to communicate with them,” said Evan Feinberg, president of Generation Opportunity, the Koch-funded nonprofit that focuses on young voters.

Mindful of privacy concerns, not all states open up the information spigot on their under-18 pre-registered voters. In California, Colorado, Delaware, Minnesota, Nevada and Rhode Island, campaigns can’t obtain basic voter data until someone is actually eligible to cast a ballot. For example, Colorado’s legislature “was very clear to make pre-registrants confidential” for its 16- and 17-year-olds, said Richard Coolidge, a spokesman for Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican whose state has 19,000 under-18 voters registered to vote in the next election, among the largest group in the country.

Several states that currently do release data on underage voters are also facing pressure to black that information out.

“I don’t want any politician trying to contact my 16-year-old kid. Nor do I want the corporate advertising monoliths to get their hooks into them too early,” said Wally Hicks, a former Oregon state representative who last session joined his fellow Republican Berger on an amendment aimed at shutting down the public disclosure of data on teenagers. The underlying bill, which would have lowered the pre-registration age in Oregon from 17 to 16, died in the state Senate, but Oregon Democrats are expected to revive the proposal in 2015.

A similar call to restrict data on under-18 preregistered voters is being heard in Tallahassee, where the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, a coalition of top county voting officials, included the issue on its list of 2015 legislative priorities.

“We hear directly from voters, what they like and don’t like, and I can tell you unequivocally they don’t like the focus on 16- and 17-year-olds,” said Brian Corley, the association’s president-elect and the elections supervisor from Pasco County.

On the ground, future voters and their teachers say they are routinely approached by political campaigns. In battleground states like Iowa, 17-year-old high school students get phone calls from grassroots groups pleading with them to pledge their vote, attend events and volunteer for presidential campaigns, said Jacob Brindle, an English teacher at Cascade Senior High School, which is about 25 miles southwest of Dubuque.

“They are targets,” Brindle said. As the Iowa Caucus campaign begins, he tries to explain to his students the reasons why so much information is coming at them despite their age: They are still forming their allegiances and campaigns think they can be easily swayed with an onslaught of text messages, printed literature and other pressure tactics.

“You are prime, prime, prime for these candidates because your vote can [help] win Iowa,” Brindle said he tells his students.

Jordan Cozby, a 16-year-old junior at Bob Jones High School in Madison, Ala., who is active in Democratic politics, said he’s encountered parents leery of having their teenagers engage with campaigns — especially when they’ll be canvassing or working with strangers in offices in an unfamiliar part of town.

“That’s a daunting perspective for a young person and their parents,” said Cozby, who launched his state chapter of the High School Democrats of America and during the 2012 campaign made hundreds of phone calls each week on Obama’s behalf trying to recruit volunteers and supporters in neighboring Florida.

Obama 2008 and 2012 alumni say campaigns need to take account of special concerns about reaching out to high school students who aren’t yet 18. In the last two races, Democrats researched the best methods to contact 16- and 17-year olds, learning, for example, that text messages can get better results than emails. They also were careful to let students approach them first, and then used the volunteer as the conduit to seek out other classmates.

“We needed to be very deliberate on how we targeted them,” said Valeisha Butterfield-Jones, Obama’s 2012 national youth vote director. To best allocate its resources on teens, the Obama campaign combined voter rolls with other publicly available data and information shared by young people who attended live events and signed up to volunteer.

“I think campaigns are going to have to be very careful if they’re contacting with young people,” Butterfield-Jones said. “Civic responsibility is important. But there’s a fine line when you’re talking about minors.”

Nonetheless, many campaign operatives and experts on youth voting insist there’s little downside in outreach to people as they get closer to their 18th birthday. Why shield teenagers from experiencing high-octane campaigning, they reason, since it will be a norm for the rest of their adult lives?

“I don’t want to treat them as delicate flowers when it comes to politics,” said Peter Levine, the director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. “I can think of worse things to do to them than send them a political message. I think they can figure it out.”