Youth Funding and the Outcome of the 2008 Election

Mattie Weiss, the director of Campus Camp Wellstone, has an important blog up on her site today entitled Where is the Love. In her post, Weiss notes that, despite record breaking youth turnout for Senator Obama, funding for youth organizations is anemic at best. Some youth organizations like The League are running mainly on volunteer energy, and almost no youth organization is working at its full scale and capacity considering we are now in the final sprint of a major Presidential Election in which young people may play a pivotal, if not decisive, role.

This shouldn't be too much of a surprise to readers of this site. We've been blogging about the lack of funds in the youth organizing sphere for months, and in fact, by some estimates, investments in youth organizing this year are only 25% of what they were in 2004 (to be fair, that number has probably climbed since I last reported on this, though I don't know by how much).

While I can't say that I definitively understand the minds of donors, there are a few plausible reasons for this:

• The protracted primary process - donors wanted to wait and see who would win before giving. In this scenario, if Obama lost, money would have presumably flooded in to fill the gap in youth organizing left by his loss.
• Conversely, because Obama won, in no small part on the strength of his youth organization, donors felt there was little need to invest in independent youth organizations and their money was better spent elsewhere.
• Obama specifically stated that donors should not give to independent 527 organizations. Not all 527 organizations are media hit squads. There are field organizations like the Young Democrats who also fall under that tax designation and may have suffered from these comments by the Obama team.

This isn't to say that there weren't big advocates in the donor world who were out there pitching the case for more investment in independent youth organizing. And it isn't to say that there aren't donors who stepped up to the plate this year. There are, without a doubt. But it's undeniable that the amount and strength of support is far less than it was four years ago.

Even though Obama tacitlylifted the sanctions against 527 organizations, I don't expect to see the floodgates opening for youth organizations. The best youth groups we have are field organizers and it's just getting to be too late in the game for a major cash infusion to do as much as it could have 6 months ago. They can't just whip up an ad and buy time on the TV like the media 527s can. Certainly organizations like The League that are operating with volunteers can still use the cash to make their people full time in the states in which they are active. But the opportunity to get these groups to scale up even further and operate in a coordinated fashion (as much as legally possible), is quickly slipping away.

What's done is done, and we're all going to have to make due with what we have this year. So let's look forward to 2009 and 2010. There are two possible outcomes to this election, both with similar ramification for the future of progressive youth funding.

1. Obama wins
2. Obama loses

No brainer, right? So what happens if he wins . . . what is the narrative? Most likely it will be a justification for his investment in the youth vote. No more will young voters be a "hidden" vote, unicorns, the "icing on the cake" or fool's gold. The youth vote will be a real, proven force in 21st Century American Politics. State parties will begin to raise money and invest in full-time youth directors, and campaigns will all make a play for young voters in their districts (best case scenario).

Should that happen, my hope is that this will also open up a much wider field of donors willing to give some of their money towards youth organizing, allowing us to expand the donor pool beyond the half dozen or so major funders that have built this movement thus far. With Obama not directly on the ballot in 2010, that might be an easy case to make. I hope so.

If Obama loses, even if the youth vote turnout in record numbers and vote overwhelmingly in favor of Senator Obama, they will likely be blamed for his loss. It won't matter that the youth vote, as with John Kerry, will likely be the only age demographic to break in favor of Senator Obama. It won't matter if we break record turnout levels or increase our share of the electorate. The youth vote strategy will be deemed a failure, again, and young voters will take a bad rap for Obama's beat.

In that case, we're going to need to do some political jujitsu. It's going to be our responsibility to remind donors and activists and bloggers and everyone who will listen that donors did not invest in youth organizations in 2008. That they left it up to the Obama campaign, which at that time will be little more than a memory, barring some conversion a la Democracy for America. We'll need to pivot off of that somehow to make the case that we need to reinvest in youth organizing like we did in 2004 and 2006. Those will be dark days, as was 2005, when so many youth organizations from the '04 cycle went bust.

There is, of course, a third option. That win or lose, 2004 was the apex of progressive investment in youth organizing. I don't even want to think about that option . . .