It's Time to Invest in Communications Work

Earlier this week I wrote a post called "If the Youth Vote, Obama Wins" - Yes, But It's More Complicated, in which I tried to walk back some potentially outlandish claims about just how high youth turnout will be in November. I imagine that for a lot of you it was weird to see me, one of the biggest youth vote cheerleaders, disagreeing with such a positive description of youth potential. As I stated at the time, my purpose wasn't to say that youth wouldn't vote or turnout in record numbers, rather it was to manage expectations about what that record turnout might look like.

In 2004, youth turnout increased dramatically, but you wouldn't know it by reading the papers or watching the news. Turnout jumped by 4.3 million, from 40 to 49%. So what happened? Two things. First, the press confused "share of the electorate" with "turnout." Youth turnout rose, but share of the electorate remained steady as all age groups increased their turnout. More significantly, after months of hype about the power of the youth vote, John Kerry didn't win.

The bad youth vote narrative that emerged on November 3rd, 2004 was not just a consequence of bad reporting, it was a consequence of the failure of youth organizations to adequately manage expectations. It was P. Diddy completely dominating the political media and pumping up the youth vote without a real field operation to back up his words. It was the over-the-top rhetoric employed by so many youth organizations (myself included) about how youth would be the difference for John Kerry. In short - it was a communications failure.

Over the past 5 years, we have invested a lot of money in building leadership capacity/training programs, and field programs to engage young voters through peer-to-peer outreach. During that same time, little to no money was invested in expanding the communications capacity of partisan youth organizations. Is it any wonder it took over three years and multiple wins at the federal level (2006 midterms, 2008 primaries) to achieve even the adequate youth vote narrative currently in the media?

I subscribe to about 20 Google Alerts every day that track youth vote stories in the media. It is not a comprehensive tracking system by any means, but it gives me a good idea about what is getting discussed. Most recently, there seem to be two major storylines about young voters:

• Registration in state X are up due to increased youth registration
• Generation Gap stories, usually a variation on "will youth burn Obama at the polls" or "Obama need to focus more on older people."

Almost none of these stories mentions a progressive or non partisan youth organization as a cause of increased youth engagement, or uses a staffer from one of our organizations as a source. Of the youth vote stories that do quote an organization or use one of our people as a source, I would say that the top two stories are:

• Blurbs about Rock the Vote's Stila Lipstick
• Bits about Christina Aguilera's Rock the Vote PSA

These are not substantive stories. I don't mean to hit on Rock the Vote here - they've had some great press hits this year including a whole hour on the Larry King Live show. And bear in mind that this is a completely unscientific study, but it would seem that youth vote organizations and the progressive youth movement are not in any significant way driving the youth vote narrative during an election that may see the most significant youth participation since the passage of the 26th Amendment.

That's a problem.

The long and short is, it's time to invest in partisan communications work, not just field work, within the youth infrastructure we created these last five years. I know money is tight this cycle, but with the Obama campaign implicitly lifting the ban on independent expenditures, perhaps we'll start to see more money flow into our work. If so, it's time to invest in real media monitoring and rapid response, a larger effort to place our staffers in print and on the air, and the proper training to make sure they do a good job when they do get in the media.

It's time to take control of the story that the media and the public tell about our work.