California is home to at least a half dozen Republican-held House seats that could prove critical to flipping the 24 seats necessary for Democrats to take control of the House. Billionaire donor Tom Steyer has already committed several millions to a coordinated voter outreach effort called "Uniting California," but he's now pouring several million more into turning out millennials across the state. McClatchy writes:
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, much of state’s record low voter participation in 2014 was due to abysmally low turnout among young people.
The billionaire former hedge fund manager is aiming to reverse that trend in 2018, and is preparing to spend at least $3.5 million on grassroots outreach to millennials in the state to do it, according to an election plan shared with The Sacramento Bee. As of now, Steyer’s organization, NextGen America, has 15 full-time staff working on its millennial outreach program in the state’s seven Republican congressional districts that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won in 2016. They expect that number to double to 30 full-time staff by November, with another 50 part-time workers. [...]
Getting those young voters, who are disproportionately liberal, to the polls could make the difference in what are expected to be tight races for two Central Valley congressional seats currently held by Republicans Jeff Denham and David Valadao. According to Census Bureau data, their districts have higher percentages of millennial residents than any of the five GOP congressional seats the liberal group is targeting in Southern California. A third of voting-age residents in Denham’s Modesto-area district are 35 years old or younger. That figure climbs to 38 percent in Valadao’s district, which runs along the I-5 corridor just to the west of Fresno and Bakersfield.
Denham and Valadao won their districts in 2016 by about 10,000 and 20,000 votes respectively.
Steyer's group is trying to recreate the success it had in registering and engaging voters under 40 in Virginia last year, where millennial turnout jumped eight points in 2017 over the last statewide elections held in 2013.
“I asked the people on our team, ‘is Virginia replicable?’ And they said ‘yes,’” Steyer said. But he acknowledged, “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.”
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