Vote or Die: A Look Back at Citizens Change

A righteous cause or glorified T-shirt campaign?

In 2004, Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, and 50 Cent helped launch Citizens Change. The idea behind the group was to be a non-partisan effort to encourage young people and minorities to participate in that year’s Presidential election between Democratic candidate John Kerry and Republican candidate George W. Bush. While it was a noble effort, the success of the group is debatable at best.

Citizens Change is best known for its catchphrase "Vote or Die!”, a reference to a political cartoon by Benjamin Franklin. The phrase was plastered across ads and t-shirts back in 2004 and a South Park episode poking fun at Diddy also helped market Citizens Change, albeit unintentionally. An article from Today mentions Diddy as the mastermind behind the phrase and shirts. The phrase meant “This election is so serious that if you don’t vote, you could die.” It was a part of Diddy’s effort to make voting hot and sexy but I’m not sure what’s so sexy about dying unless you’re into that sort of thing. 

To get the youth on board with voting, the group organized events across the country, with some taking place in swing states right before election day. One such event took place at Temple University in Philadelphia and created some controversy. Citizens Change was meant to be a non-partisan group, meaning not biased toward any political party. Diddy was not a fan of either Kerry or Bush personally unlike others who spoke at events for the group including the one in Philadelphia.

At this event, Mary J. Blige was a performer but also criticized Bush along with several other performers that evening. According to Temple University’s Board of Trustees, the university is not allowed to spend money on partisan events, which is what they began to consider this one as despite Diddy’s insistence that it was non-partisan. Up to $12,000 had been spent by the university on this event and had they known that it wasn’t non-partisan, they likely wouldn’t have spent it. Diddy wasn’t even being completely honest about this as he had previously said at the Rock the Vote awards that year, “We have to get Bush’s ass out of office.” This is basically how every event of theirs went and it ended up getting them in trouble with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative non-profit, submitted a complaint to the FEC alleging that Citizens Change was created to elect John Kerry They cited Leonardo DiCaprio comments supporting John Kerry at the group’s events as evidence. It was eventually investigated and Citizens Change was cleared of any allegations. 

This situation highlights what I feel was the main problem with Citizens Change: It felt pointless. You have a bunch of celebrities getting together saying things need to change but the face of the group doesn’t endorse either candidate nor does he suggest even a third party candidate. He just tells college kids to go vote. Vote for who? Just vote! During a press conference, he said “I’m not campaigning for Kerry. I’m not running a campaign on the low for Kerry. I’m campaigning for the people.” The group’s message was just an empty platitude meant to impress the politically ignorant. 

It should come as no surprise then that the group failed with its goal of getting the youth out to vote in 2004. Voter turnout wasn’t all that different from 2000’s election and Bush won of course, which I’m sure Diddy wasn’t happy about. Regardless, the group returned for both 2008 and 2020 elections although with less fanfare compared to their 2004 debut.

The group didn’t return for the 2024 Presidential Election. This likely has to do with the fact that P. Diddy was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and is currently in prison until his trial concludes. I think it’s for the best that the group doesn’t make a comeback. It’s too attached to Diddy and because it didn’t accomplish much in the first place besides getting people registered to vote, something Taylor Swift can accomplish with one Instagram post. For his whole career, Diddy always tried to make himself this arbiter of social justice but he never really had anything insightful to say. However, I do feel what he said in this article from 2004 was very insightful: “There will be an opportunity to have a woman president, a black president, a Latino president, a gay president,” he told AP. “Anything’s possible if a community flexes its power. That won’t happen overnight though. We have to stay focused. We have to grow our power within politics to be able to break down those barriers.”