Rock the Vote and Young Voter Strategies Merge

The big news in the youth movement this week is that the old man of the Youth Vote - Rock the Vote - just merged with its studious younger sibling, Young Voter Strategies. Together, the two organizations will combine "the best components of YVS's research and outreach with Rock the Vote's long history of work to build political power for young adults." This is something that's been in the works for quite a while. Now that it has finally come to fruition, I'm left hoping for the best, but still asking a lot of questions.

Young Voter Strategies made a name for itself by rigorously investigating and documenting the most effective methods for reaching young voters and then promoting their findings to campaigns and the media. It's thanks in part to their work that so many Presidential campaigns now have full-time youth outreach staff that sit high up in the field department. It's due in part to their work that even down-ticket campaigns are devising youth outreach strategies and investing their resources in mobilizing young people. For the last few years, YVS has preached the value of peer to peer outreach and the importance of field work.

Yet Rock the Vote is primarily a media organization. In 1992 the organization accomplished an incredible amount by combining field work and a media campaign. 1992 was the first year the youth vote saw a significant increase since 1972. There were a lot of factors at work - an unusually competitive Presidential race (this was the year of Ross Perot) and strong work from the National Campaign for Student Voter Registration and the Student Environmental Action Coalition - but much of the success of that year can be attributed to Rock the Vote's combined media and field strategy. Since then, the field program has atrophied and media has become the primary focus of the organization. Indeed, this is the primary criticism I hear about the organization from ex-staff, youth organizers, and my peers who grew up with Rock the Vote as the only voice in the political debate that even tried to appeal to normal folks (read: non political junkies). Rather than create a culture of activism - or teach people to Live Liberally as we say around here - Rock the Vote devolved into a mechanism to sell young people a product: voting.

To be clear, this isn't at all to say that Rock the Vote hasn't had successes in recent times, or that it won't do good work in 2008. In 2004, 1.2 million people downloaded registration forms from their website. 75% of those people actually followed-through and registered, and 79% of those folks turned out at the polls. Those are good numbers. With their new online vote registration widget, they stand to make some substantial gains in online registration in 2008.

But what happens when you bring these two very different organizations together? I've spoken with some of the Rock the Vote/YVS staff and the answer is still very much up in the air. On the one hand, there is some very exciting low-hanging fruit. Rock the Vote's media campaigns - on TV, Radio, FaceBook, MySpace, etc. - will get the benefit of the rigorous research techniques of YVS. We'll start to get some real hard data on just how people use these tools and how effective they are for organizing young voters. Meanwhile YVS will get the megaphone that Rock the Vote provides. Their research will gain a broader audience, and hopefully that will translate into more resources being directed towards the youth vote and more political power for young people.

The real question, though, is this: Will YVS - which for years has preached the power and importance of peer-to-peer, field outreach - revitalize Rock the Vote's field program? That, to me, is the biggest value-added that YVS could bring to Rock the Vote. Right now, it's an open question. Rock the Vote has yet to hire a political director, or write a field plan (let alone fundraise for it). So my question to the community is this - should Rock the Vote revitalize its field program, and if so, what would that look like?

There are a number of challenges and questions inherent in concert-based organizing on a mass scale. Any proposed field operation would have to address these challenges:

• How will you recruit and organize volunteers?
• How will you distribute materials among your volunteers?
• What will be your quality control mechanisms in registering voters?
• How will you handle Artist recruitment and relations?
• At what scale will you do this? How "big" are the artists and venues?
• Tour-based model or venue-based model?
• Will your model be centralized or decentralized (and how do you execute each)?

Some combination of the following might serve as a model:

• Link up with local organizations (501c's) and help them do concert-based outreach in their locale.
• Decentralize everything (provide local folks with artist hookups, downloadable materials, etc., maybe work on a FaceBook Application to handle event calendaring and volunteer logistics)
• Partner with Air Traffic Control on artist recruitment and coordination with local groups
• Re-granting programs to bolster the work of small cultural outreach orgs in target areas (like Elementz in Cincinatti, Yo! the Movement, etc.)
• Co-opting MFA's volunteer system and re-centralize the whole process at Rock the Vote (This is the least desireable option, in my opinion, but certainly on the table).

A few months ago, I wrote a piece asking Who Will Rock the Vote in 2008? The answer may well be Rock the Vote. But if it's not, the answer may well be no one. That's important - young people self identify by their music tastes more than any other indicator - including race, ethnicity, or ideology. And peer-to-peer outreach (as YVS taught us) is the gold standard for reaching young folks.

If Rock the Vote doesn't implement a concert-based field program, we're going to miss what is likely to be the best chance in the next 5 years to truly integrate civic participation into the fabric of youth culture and the daily experience of the largest generation since the Baby Boom. Let's not pass up an opportunity to teach a generation not just about voting as an abstract "civic responsibility," but rather how to Live Liberally. If you were running Rock the Vote's field program, what would you do?