Adam Hanover registered 584 people in his county to vote. But Adam, the Republican Party’s youth and voter registration chairman for Shelby County, Tennessee, doesn’t plan to cast a vote come election day. Not until 2006, anyway.

Adam is only 16.

The high school junior is an exception to the downward trend of political involvement among America’s youth. The percentage of people 18 to 24 who show up at the polls has dropped 13 percentage points since 1972, the first presidential election after the voting age was lowered to 18, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, commonly referred to as CIRCLE. Studies have shown that youths are likely to feel disengaged from the political process.

Adam has been engaged in the process since he was 7.

A political junkie at Ridgeway High School in Memphis, Tenn., he earned the nickname “Mr. President” as a child because of the way he would walk around his synagogue and shake everyone’s hand. By 12, he had worked on his first political campaign, cleaning up after parties for the 2000 Bush-Cheney effort in Memphis. In 2002, Adam joined A.C. Wharton’s mayoral campaign in Shelby County, attending fundraisers and distributing campaign literature and signs.

“It was just normal stuff that a normal 13-year-old or so would do,” said Adam, who has worked on other campaigns since, including the 2002 campaign for Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and George W. Bush’s current presidential bid.

But Adam is more of an anomaly than the norm. He represents the antithesis to the youth voter problem, which hit an all-time low in 2000 when only 36.1 percent of people 18 to 24 voted, compared with 59.5 percent of the overall eligible population, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey. Only 50.7 percent of young voters were even registered to vote in 2000, while 69.5 percent of the entire voting population was registered.

As founder of Vote Now, a grassroots voter registration effort that he launched at his high school, Adam represents the political impact youths could be missing out on.

“He’s a political animal,” said David Kustoff, general chairman for the Bush-Cheney campaign in Tennessee.



Getting peers to the polls

Adam, too young to fit into the youngest demographic of voters, noticed the low turnout among young Americans while working for David Kustoff’s unsuccessful campaign in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District. In 2002, he launched Vote Now.

“I thought it would be cool to register high school seniors before they went to college,” Adam said. “Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t register during college. They would wait until afterward.”

As a 14-year-old freshman, Adam teamed with Ann Baumgartner, a U.S. history teacher at Ridgeway, to institute the program. Adam worked as the middleman; he picked up enough voter registration forms for all eligible students, delivered them to home rooms, picked up completed forms and returned them to the Shelby County Election Committee.

Adam thought the less effort students had to put into registering, the more likely they would be to sign up. He was right. Since the program began, Vote Now has registered 300 seniors at Ridgeway High School alone, and it is expanding to two other Memphis-area high schools.

At 14, Adam tapped into what civic education experts, such as Scott Keeter, the associate director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, believe to be the most valuable resource in mobilizing young voters: peer-to-peer contact.

“They need someone to knock on their door, call them on the phone and ask, ‘Are you registered?’” Keeter said.

Young people are the best “get-out-and-vote” resource, according to a study conducted by CIRCLE. Its research indicates that a young person asking another young person to vote raises the likelihood of turnout by as much as 12 percentage points.

“It is ironic that he is such a great volunteer and he is not even voting age,” Kustoff said. “He is able to talk to his generation. It takes a special person to communicate the issues.”

Because of Adam’s work with Vote Now, Shelby County’s Republican Party chairman, Kemp Conrad, asked him to become the party’s youth and voter registration chairman.

In the position, Adam recruits people to register Shelby County residents in churches and at various community events. He also oversees the Shelby County Teen Republicans group.

“Adam is very mature for his age, very focused and goal-oriented,” Conrad said. “He is someone who is involved in politics for the right reasons: to make a difference.”

After working with Adam for a few months, Conrad describes his work as “first-class” and “punctuated with enthusiasm.”

“He’s a professional guy that acts about twice his age,” Conrad said.

In some ways, Adam does act his age. He blasts techno music to psych himself up before soccer games, and he is preparing to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test in March. He becomes stressed by history exams, thinks about college and cruises with friends.

In between soccer practices and English homework, Adam spends hours watching international news, reading The New York Times and researching news events on the Internet. He has worked as much as 15 hours a week for the Bush campaign.

Being named youth and voter registration chairman was a promotion for Adam, who was frustrated that he didn’t have a key job during the 2000 campaign.

“He was mad that they were just using him as a janitor and not asking him to really do something very important,” said Marc Hanover, Adam’s father.

Adam’s father said one of his son’s proudest moments this year was when he received the stationery for the Bush campaign with his name and title.

“He called me up and said, ‘I really got a real job, a real job,’” Marc Hanover said.

Adam’s position in the campaign adds one more notch to his expanding political résumé. Even at a young age, Adam wanted to be a politician.

“When I was younger, I would say that I wanted to be president, but if that didn’t work out, I would play major league baseball,” Adam said. “I was really just a talker.”

Adam’s baseball career ended when he was 13, about the time his political career began. Adam developed sincere political beliefs when he began high school and aligned himself with the Republican Party, which sets him apart from the majority of young Americans, who consider themselves Independent.

Forty-one percent of college undergraduates now identify themselves as Independent, up from 38 percent in 2003, according to a survey conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics last March. The same survey indicated that 32 percent identify themselves as Democrats while 24 percent call themselves Republicans.

“Typically, you don’t crystallize your political ideals until your late 20s,” said Connie Flanagan, a professor of youth civic development at Penn State University. “It’s unusual for someone so young.”

Flanagan said that for many young people, the “natural issues of growing up” — who their friends are, what classes they are going to take, identifying life goals — are more immediate concerns than politics. However, as they get older, they begin to formulate political views as they encounter people with more diverse experiences.

Youths aren’t exposed to different ways of looking at the world or thinking about issues when they are in high school because their network of people is homogenous, Flanagan said. Their networks tend to be limited to family, friends and the people living in their neighborhood, all of whom have fairly similar attitudes. It isn’t until they leave home that they are exposed to people whose lives are quite different.



Not the typical youthful idealist
While he calls himself a Republican, Adam tries to keep an open mind and considers himself a moderate on several issues such as the environment. He even crossed party lines when he volunteered for Shelby County mayor, A.C. Wharton, a Democrat.

“He just wants to be a part of the system, to affect the system and make it function better,” said Kustoff, the Tennessee Bush campaign chairman. “I think he has been very selective in the things he has worked on and the people he has worked for. He really believes in them.”

Adam thought Wharton was “a great individual” and the best man for the job – traits he found more important than party lines.

“Because I’m young, I kind of take advantage of that and instead of being completely partisan, I do allow myself to work for people like A.C. Wharton,” Adam said. “I try to be very idealistic and optimistic, of course.”

Yet Adam described himself as “staunchly Republican” on several issues, such as abortion, which he opposes. His top concern, however, is terrorism. He said that while he was not a radical in his views on terrorism, he did not support any negotiations with terrorists.

Adam, who is Jewish, comes from a Zionist family and has done extensive research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He aspires to be a policy adviser on Middle East issues and maintains a Web site that promotes a pro-Zionist stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Adam’s interest in the environment spurred his first act of political activism. After watching loose papers fly out of a recycling truck, the perturbed 7-year-old decided to write a letter to then President Bill Clinton because the recycling truck was actually creating more trash.

“I was really mad,” Adam said. “I just thought it was so hypocritical.”

When he received his first letter back from the White House, he cried in excitement. Adam continued to write Clinton letters anytime an issue interested him, including the Major League Baseball strike in 1994. Even though the replies generally were written by a presidential aide, Adam still was happy to be receiving letters from Washington.

“He believes that he can change things in the world,” Marc Hanover said. “He believes that he can convince the Israelis and Palestinians to make peace. He believes that he can find new energy sources and convince those who don’t want to fool with the natural environment to fix the energy sources in the world.”

Adam’s youthful idealism is not rare.

Craig Rimmerman, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, has researched youth activism and voting habits and has found that today’s youth are active in ways that do not involve going to a voting booth.

“They want to make a more positive contribution by doing what they would think is quality work and quality contributions to their communities and to their campuses,” Rimmerman said.

Today’s youths see themselves as “clientele of the government,” lacking a sense of civic duty, Rimmerman said. While they want to make a tangible difference in the world, they do not believe they can do it by voting or being politically involved.

“I think that there is, on the part of a decent number of young people, a general distrust of people in power on both the left and the right,” Rimmerman said.

Adam’s letter-writing days, however, convinced him he could trust the government and expect results.



Becoming ‘Mr. President’
Adam can’t pinpoint where his attraction to the political process came from. His father is the president and co-founder of GTx, a biotech company in Memphis, and his mother, Jan, helps with Adam’s grandfather’s medical practice. Neither is particularly politically active, but both encouraged Adam and his brother, Andrew, a 19-year-old sophomore at New York University, to ask questions.

“We’re big (on) eating dinner together and having discussions about different things as it relates specifically to the world and issues around it,” said Marc Hanover. “(Adam) always asks more questions than I think I can even answer.”

Adam’s interest in politics may have been stimulated by his parents’ political conversations at dinner. Marc is Republican. Jan has typically voted Democratic, although she is supporting Bush in this election.

“It’s made him ask a lot of questions,” said Marc Hanover.

Flanagan, a professor of youth civic development at Penn State University, thinks listening to his parents’ discussions gave Adam balanced views on political issues.

“If parents are from two political persuasions, it makes politics an interesting topic of discussion and brings in different perspectives,” Flanagan said.

Marc Hanover realizes that his youngest son has lofty goals and dreams, but he and his wife have worked hard to keep him well-balanced and grounded.

“You can be the president of the United States, but you have to play soccer and be with your friends and hang out and do all the things that kids would do,” Marc Hanover said. “We’re trying to make sure he stays a kid as long as he can stay a kid, but at the same time be mature enough to handle himself in any given situation.”

His ability to talk is one reason Adam’s nickname, “Mr. President,” fits him well. He speaks clearly and emphatically and is able to reference philosophy, from Socrates to Siddhartha. He learned at a young age to shake hands with a firm grip and maintain eye contact. He remembers the names of all the people he meets and keeps in close contact with them. He even scheduled a visit from the Rwandan Ambassador to the United States in Memphis for the end of October.

He has a growing network of political contacts from his local campaign work and from his stay this summer at St. Albans School of Public Service in Washington D.C., a program that combines college-level coursework with guest speakers and debates. Adam was the youngest person to attend the program this summer.

Despite his precocious experience working in political campaigns and his ability to discuss politics and cite a plethora of facts and figures, Adam recognizes gaps in his knowledge.

“I can’t tell you about health care,” he said. “I haven’t done enough research to be able to discuss with you HMOs and the recent court case passed affecting HMOs and all that other stuff. That would be lying.”

Adam has left himself room to grow, and while he is pulling for Bush, he just wants to get more people to the polls.

“Today I gave out seven stickers,” he said. “People are very interested, not just in Bush, in all politics, and whether they are pro-Kerry or pro-Bush, either way, I just like talking to them about it.”