Oliver Willis Hates Young People

Oliver Willis jumps onto the "I Hate Young People" bandwagon, as well as the "Barack Obama's strategy sucks" bandwagon in this piece from a few days ago.

I've been reading Willis since 2004, and I love him as a smart, funny writer, but here he's repeating a lot of just plain wrong information that unfortunately became conventional wisdom. The narrative Willis is peddling runs something like this: Young people were supposed to turnout huge for Howard Dean in 2004. Dean lost the Iowa caucuses, so the youth vote must not have materialized. Therefore, young overs screwed Howard Dean and any attempt at a youth strategy is a loser for Democratic candidates.

There are a number of problems here. Youth participation in Iowa quadrupled (pdf) in 2004. Young people came out in force. Problem was, they split their vote among all the candidates. For sure, Generation Dean had trouble effectively organizing in Iowa, and those young people who voted for Dean were terrible at the politicking vital to success in the Iowa caucuses. But those were problems that were organization wide. Young people didn't "screw Dean" any more than old people, Boomers, or Gen Xers did. It was a team failure that was just as much about the national campaign as it was anything else.

Willis ends his piece by taking a swipe at social networking activism, all but applying a label of armchair activist to young voters, while simultaneously praising what he "feels" is a supercharged, hyper-efficient organization of "older" Hillary supporters out there in the world doing real campaigning. While I'm sure Stephen Colbert will be happy to know that Willis trusts his gut over evidence when he writes his columns, I'll suggest that when thousands of people show up at a student rally, the folks behind that are doing some real campaign work.

Now, all that said, I agree with Willis that Barack needs to turn all those FaceBook supporters into voters. This is the challenge in front of them. But having spoken to the campaign, this is a well understood fact. One can argue that they are failing or succeeding to a greater or lesser degree, but Willis isn't doing that that.

One final thought - I'm really resistant to the narrative that young voters are going to "carry candidate X over the top." I've been there, I did that in 2004. Young voters came out in force, and actually did pick Kerry to win, but it was a foolish narrative to be pushing. We all saw the blowback when Kerry lost and that defeat was laid at the feet of supposedly absentee young voters.

Young voters will be a force at the ballot box this year. Will they tip the balance? Maybe for some candidates downticket, maybe not for others. The real point we should focus on is that turnout is rising and young voters are an important part of the electorate - but we are just a part. I'm more interested in getting voters under 30 a permanent, respected seat at the table than having us play kingmaker for a cycle. This is a long game and swinging for those home runs is a dangerous strategy with unnaturally high expectations. We've all seen what happens when you miss, or even if you hit a double. It was stupid of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to play that expectations game in his latest memo, and disappointing to see Willis buying into the bogus results from the last cycle.