YDA Day 2: Vote Pledges and Peer-to-Peer

As I mentioned yesterday, if Day 1 at YDA was all about internal business and caucuses (activities which do, btw, continue throughout the conference), then the second day was all about action. As I've written in the past, YDA is still undergoing a transformation from a networking organization that provided manual labor for state parties and candidates into a chapter-based field organization focused on peer-to-peer GOTV of the often neglected youth vote. Day 2 was all about pushing that peer-to-peer program. Here's Tony Cani, YDA's political director breaking it down:

As Tony explains, the vote pledges - and the establishment of metrics for attaining pledges on the state level - are the focus of the day. The pledge cards - which declare the signatory's intention to vote for a Democrat in the fall, is really just the entry point to a whole series of "touches" - via text message, facebook, phone calls and door-knocks - that end with the person pulling the lever for Obama in the fall. It's also a way for YDA National and YDA chapters to measure their work - providing valuable information about the capabilities of the organization as well as data that can be used for fundraising purposes during the next cycle.

Most of the day is structured around trainings in peer-to-peer- organizing as a way to gather vote pledges. These include community service projects (the Democrats Work model), concerts and festivals (the MFA/Head Count model), campus organizing, online organizing (with a focus on Facebook and state blogs) and more. The day was capped off with a field exercise in which 10 teams competed to gather the most vote pledges as possible - online and on the streets of downtown Nashville - in the span of one hour.

Not everyone was thrilled with this use of YDA time. As I've written before, not all YDA members and chapters are bought-in to the new, peer-to-peer model, and there seemed to be some resistance to the idea of the vote pledges. At the YDA conference I attended in New Hampshire last Novembe, at the YDA Fall Conference, very few attendees participated in the field trainings. Instead, many chose to ditch YDA and canvass for their preferred presidential campaign. This time around participation in field training activities seemed to be on the rise, though still below a majority of conference members. The culture of the organization - who it's members are and how they view YDA's place in Democratic politics - continues to change, but it seems like they're still a ways to go before everyone drinks the peer to peer Kool Aid.