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.

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“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.”