Fox News Attacks Clinton, Misrepresents Young and College Democrats

When our former ED Jane Fleming first went on Fox News I have to tell you I was very against it. We would get huge chunks of hate mail, and often the Fox hosts would do whatever they could to make us look silly.

Jane was confident that in addition to the usual wingnuts, people on our side were watching based on positive mail she would get. This lead to Jane arguing that it was valuable for us to be on Fox News, however ridiculous they may be.

To determine this beyond anecdotal evidence I set out to track our web traffic and new chapter creation (on our webpage anyone can come, do a zip search to find a local chapter and join one OR create a new chapter if none exists) during the times Jane was on Fox.

I was not surprised to see a huge spike in traffic whenever Jane (and this remains the case with Alexandra) were on. What I was very surprised to see was the huge spike in new chapter creations and chapter joins. The most activity in this area whenever we are on Fox? High school students and chapters in areas we don't have much Democratic organizing at all. This flipped me - I was no longer against appearing on FNC.

You can speculate why this is the case ... maybe it is oppressed children of Republicans watching the news with their parents then sneaking away to show their true blue colors ... or maybe it is something different. Either way - it builds our organization and it builds our Party.

We knew it was only a matter of time before Fox tried to pull something like this on us, but accepting their invitations to appear was a calculated decision that we came to after weighing costs and benefits. Now that the Hannity people have done their best to make it look like young people were anti-Hillary at the CDA convention (despite what Alexandra actually SAID) we are going to revisit this debate, but I wanted to be clear that the question isn't: "legitimize Fox or not". The question is "build organization in new areas using Fox" or "ignore Fox". Now, the decision might be to ignore - but

I think we easily get caught in the trap of assuming that anyone who would dare watch Fox News, or anyone who has conservative leanings at some point in their life, are never going to be Democrats. I mean, how could they - OBVIOUSLY they must be total idiots. In most non-Democratic circles, this is called elitist, and I'd add that assuming our party could get NO supporters off Fox News is a hugely sweeping generalization which our little chapter/hits experiments has proven to be false.

Here is the difference as well ... YDA is not a Senate or House race. Our goal isn't to get to 50% plus 1 by maximizing our contact time with supporters and persuadables - ignoring geographic areas and individuals who are a "waste of time". No, our mission is to build a bloc of Young Democratic voters EVERYWHERE not just in places which already have a propensity to lean Democratic and not just with people who already are Democrats. This is going to require getting our hands dirty and finding ways to communicate with the giant chunk of America that doesn't believe what we do -- but almost definitely has a whole bunch of young people still making up their minds. Hopefully we can give a counterargument to the one their family and community is already giving.

We pride ourselves at YDA on comfortably stepping off college campuses realizing that not all young people are students, but we also feel the same way about working in rural and "red" areas - knowing very well that if we are able to organize a small number of Dems in those areas - the long term benefits could be profound. Appearing on Fox seems to be one way to do this for us and that makes this decision all the more involved.