Helping Students to Organize Themselves

Great, great story on young voters and Students for Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal. This may be the first piece I've seen that really picks up on what peer to peer organizing, applied at the local level, is all about:

Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidency could rest on the votes of 20-to-30-year-olds -- and, to an unprecedented degree, he is letting his young supporters decide how to win those votes.
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At the University of Detroit Mercy, Lauren Wolfe, a 25-year-old superdelegate, set out cautiously with her clipboard to hit the bars to register Democrats to vote. Wayne County, which houses the university, has more than 1,400 businesses licensed to sell alcohol.

"We were shocked by the amount of people that really responded," says Ms. Wolfe. "We had one guy who had just moved from New York and knew that his vote in New York didn't mean as much as it did in Michigan. He was like, 'I'm so glad that you guys are here because I probably never would have actually switched my registration.'"

In Oregon, music and arts-based approaches have been more effective. At one Oregon university, students set up a party tent with an artist who painted murals of Sen. Obama. Whoever registered to vote at the tent was invited to sign the mural. The setup drew more students and eventually local musicians who would perform and attract more young voters, says Ms. Arsenault.

"In this campaign they gave students the ability to actually recognize what was needed," says Molly Kawahata, an 18-year-old convention delegate from California and an incoming freshman at University of California, Berkeley.
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In part, the local-autonomy approach emerged from lessons learned during the primary season. Student organizers at Boston College, for instance, gathered students to canvass community colleges in nearby Berlin and Manchester, N.H., says Joshua Darr, the 21-year-old Massachusetts director of Students for Barack Obama.

"The Obama campaign has really trusted students to organize their own campuses and that's very encouraging," says Mr. Darr.

Hell yeah - providing the resources to let young people organize how they know best in their communities. As long as you add in tracking and accountability, this is the way that youth organizing should work. All Democratic campaigns, and all Democratic state and local parties, should have similar organizing strategies for youth. As should outside organizations that work in support of the party and its candidates. This shouldn't just be the work of one campaign.

On a related note, I was able to sit down with Leigh Arsenault at the Democratic Convention and was super happy with what she had to say about how they will be organizing on campuses (above), the number of organizers they are hiring, and how they'll be working off campus to reach non-college youth, and making targeted ad buys aimed at youth. I'm not a huge fan of media buys if it comes at the expense of field, but that doesn't seem like it is at all happening, and I'm very curious to see if someone can produce some real research as to what targeted ads on Comedy Central, MTV and/or Cartoon Network might produce.

Good stuff all around. More on the Obama youth plan once I have another chance to touch base with the campaign.