Part II Living Liberally: Reforming Democratic "Youth" Programs

(Ed. Note: This piece was first published on MyDD in July of 2005.)

How to use culture to inform, involve, and activate "young" voters (Vote for Change v. Music for America)

In Part I of this essay, I outlined what I believe to be a fundamental flaw in efforts by democratic groups to reach young voters - namely that they are blinded by the beltway and come on too strong with the politics out of the gate to interest more than a tiny fraction of their peers. What they should be doing is integrating their programs more fully into the lives of the people they are trying to reach. The Right already does this with churches (as everyone around here no doubt is tired of hearing), and if we want to reach young voters, we need to employ our own secret weapon - culture.

We need to do with concert venues and comedy clubs, bars and coffee shops what the Right does with churches.

That was the simple idea behind Music for America (as well as that of groups like Drinking Liberally, Punk Voter, Head Count, Concerts for Kerry/Change). We took politics, which was a topic of taboo in youth culture - an automatic badge of unhipness - and, by integrating it into the cultural fabric, changed the entire frame through which our generation perceived it. For the kids we reached, politics wasn't a freakish entity floating at the margin of their lives anymore. It was about going to good shows and hanging out with their friends, seeing a good band or having a beer. And somewhere in all that socializing and normalcy, they register to vote and get a little bit more informed. After more than 2400 shows across the county, politics became part of a typical Saturday night out.

Groups like YDA, College Dems, and Clickback America all need to embrace their less political peers, and realize that it is OK that some people don't want to participate in highly political activities. The active left needs to recognize that it's OK - no, its valuable - to have a large pool of voters who are mildly informed and involved through their everyday activities, even if they never participate in any of our "boots on the ground" activities. Our job is to organize enough events with mass appeal to keep a large majority of folks interested and informed at the most basic level.

Now, I don't think it should end with that. We should simultaneously use these informal settings to find people who can be "brought up to the next level." The point is to provide the opportunities for people to become involved at their own pace and do our damnedest to keep them loosely connected until they do decide to increase their participation.

Localism, Integration and Peer to Peer vs. Broadcast and One-Off Events

I've said a lot about the philosophy behind successful outreach to younger voters, but haven't yet gotten into the nitty-gritty "How To" of it. There were lots of attempts in the last 2 years to involve young people in politics through culture, but some worked better than others. Here I'd like to outline two examples - one illustrating the wrong way to use culture, and one outlining the correct way.

Vote for Change:

I'll start with what was widely recognized as the "biggest" music/political event of cam-paign 2004. I say biggest because it was the most widely reported, but in the grand scheme of music and politics in 2004, VfC represented only a small percentage of the total events, and probably changed no one's mind about anything. I may step on people's toes here, but I regard Vote for Change as a weird combination of utter failure and great success. Vote for Change succeeded in a task which was never stated as its main goal - raising money for ACT and MoveOn. It failed completely in the task which it claimed as its main objective - forming a union of populist politics and pop culture that convinced people to vote Democratic.

This outcome was always inevitable based on the way in VfC was organized. Vote for Change was a series of large shows offering viewers (and I purposely say viewers rather than participants) very little intimate contact, and consisted of a range of performers geared more towards people 30 years of age or older.

The size of VfC shows were a problem because they depersonalized the events. With no contact with the artists, and little to no contact with anyone on hand to discuss politics in a one-on-one setting, the events became advertisements - an embodiment of broadcast communication just as easily tuned out as the car commericals we skip with our TiVOs. The very size of the concerts distorted Vote for Change's attempted merger of culture and politics into a campaign rally in cultural drag. Combined with it's massively high-profile, and the fact that it was organized for explicitly partisan political purposes, I think the argument can be made that the concerts may have had a blowback effect on total democratic votes due to the negative publicity the tour received in the conservative press. Certainly it made people more cynical about mixing culture and politics, which in the long-run is bad for us if we plan to use culture as a driver of participation.

The choice of artists at VfC was equally disruptive of achieving the tour's stated goals. Signing acts like The Boss and James Taylor targeted older voters whose patterns of voting were already well established, at the expense of younger voters whose political ideologies have not yet calcified and/or who may not be habitual voters. In light of this, I'm not even sure that the events could have drummed up more Democratic votes if every person attending was granted a 5 minute personal interview with Bruce Springstein himself.

Music for America:

In all ways, Music for America was the opposite of Vote for Change. We didn't invent a tour wholesale with a political purpose, we piggy-backed on shows which were already scheduled and would have taken place no matter our involvement. We didn't even do the "large tour" thing for the most part, (Interestingly, the few stadium tours we piggybacked were some of the least successful shows we were involved with. The exception to this was the Warped Tour, on which we had 10 volunteers per day, a stringer on the tour bus, and our own booth in the merch village - basically we were a fully integrated element of the tour.)

The average MfA event had 3-500 people in attendance. These shows had 2-3 volunteers tabling and flyering the show - enough that during the course of the evening almost everyone at the show could theoretically have a conversation with a volunteer (before the show, during set breaks, or afterwards), or was given some information about MfA and a campaign issue that was directly related to their daily personal experiences. Between October 2003 and November 2004, we held approximately 2,400 shows attended by around 2 million people.

MfA worked because it became an established presence in the communities in which it operated. Saturday night at the Troc in Philly? MfA is probably there. Friday night at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC - MfA's got a table. Tuesday local Hip Hop night in Detroit? There's the MfA crew passing out issue cards and talking about the Rave Act. You can't just have one-off events and expect to make a cultural connection with your community and peers. If all your organization is doing is throwing one Kegger every 3 months when you need to raise money, you are not integrating yourself into the culture, you are exploiting the culture for political ends - Just like ACT and MoveOn were when they hired Bruce to tour the Swing States.

Studies show that the best motivator for political participation is being asked by a friend or peer. By operating in multiple small venues, spread across the nation, where direct, peer to peer contact was possible, MfA was able to accomplish this on a massive scale. That's the other key to success with cultural events - if this strategy is going to work, its got to be local, local, local, and its got to be underground with the musicians and the venues - the little bands that everyone loves because they think no one knows about them except their small clique. The tiny clubs owned by local folks that nurture upcoming talent. It can't be all headliners and mass-scale.

Conclusion: Props to other groups. Broadening the Argument. What I left Out.

I've focused solely on the two extreme examples in my mind of what to do and what not to do when using culture to reach voters, and because of my experience, music has been my prime example. But there were plenty of other groups geared at raising involvement, awareness and money that utilized culture successfully, and they didn't all revolve around concerts. Drinking Liberally went from 0 to over 100 chapters nationwide in the last two years with almost no staff. Once a week, all over the country from NYC to Utah you can go and have a few beers and talk politics with friends and strangers. Drinking Liberally is a fantastic model for the kind of organizing that the Young Democrats and the College Democrats need to embrace, and they're getting ready to expand their efforts into new projects like Laughing Liberally, which will focus on weekly comedy events, and Reading Liberally, a book club.

Concerts for Change (which became Concerts for Kerry) operated a fundraising operation, much like Vote for Change, but worked more like Music for America, recruiting hip, slightly underground talent to perform at small events. With only 99 concerts, they were able to raise more than $300,000 while still providing the kind of one-on-one, intimate contact that concertgoers received at Music for America events.

Imagine what a hybrid of these organizations could accomplish.

I'm sure I'm leaving tons of details out here, as well as short-changing a lot of other groups that did fantastic work like Running for Change, Run Against Bush, Driving Votes, Head Count and Punk Voter to name just a few.

I've said little about the kinds of messaging that needs to happen at these events. For some of them, like Drinking Liberally, there is no overarching messaging because the events are inherently social and networking events. Just steering the topic of conversation towards current events and making an announcement or two is enough. MfA had a system of messaging that tied multiple issues together and related it directly to the lives of the people we spoke to (like jobs, the environment and the war on terror under the guise of a national energy policy as suggested by the Apollo Alliance, or the connection between the drug war and student loan aid). I'm also aware that it may seem like I'm making light of the fact that there is no system to build a Progressive Bench - no way for us to train and foster candidates, writers and organizers like the right does.

I assure you I take all of that seriously, but the methods with which we reach out to younger voters is just as important an issue. More important, I'd argue because they will form the foundation for all those other programs and activities. I also believe that the issue I've spoke about is one that gets extremely short shrift in the blogosphere among Reform Democrats.

We need to shift our "youth organizations" focus away from career building for the big leagues and get them to start teaching the next generation in American Politics how to Live Liberally. This needs to happen through culture - in concert halls and comedy clubs, bars and coffee shops. If we don't, the new Baby Boom that began in 1990 might just end up destroying the so-called Emerging Democratic Majority.