ActBlue

Here's some video and a few links for a lazy Saturday:

• Ever wonder just what it is, exactly, that ActBlue does around here? My buddy Nate explains it all in this three minute video (embedding disabled. Again. What's up with that?).
• Bill Mahr handles O'Reilly easily in this interview, but goes for the easy joke and takes a sideswipe at young voters. WTF? Crooks and Liars has the video.
• In an appeal to us young'ns, Connecticut is going to create downloadable videos explaining the ins and outs of new optical scan voting machines. I appreciate the effort, but somehow don't see this as really working out . . .
• Election Geek puts their finger on something that's been bothering me for a long time. I was an avid reader of the Dean Nation weblog in 2003 and 2004, but now II no longer do more than skim the candidate blogs. Election Geek lays out the reason why in this Mad-Libs style post.
  

And step 2 for MySpace in the Presidential Primary Social Networking Extravaganza is to bank on the fundraising apparatus and all the great bugaboos that go along with it namely tracking names, commitments, and all other personal information for a given donor that is identifying him or herself with a given candidate.

I have to admit when ActBlue first started, as a campaign person I was terrified about the idea of going through a 3rd party with our fundraising. Someone other than us would have copies of our lists, our donors, their personal information, and anyone who worked there or interned might have access to mountains of personal data about our contributors.

Over time with more use of ActBlue I became a little more relaxed mostly because it was a clearly partisan organization. Opposition was not a threat. Last cycle I read their Privacy Policy over and over and over again before I finally started to learn how I could use it to my own benefit.
“Other than as described above, we will not use your personal information nor release it to any other party without your permission, unless we believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, violations of our terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.”

Where MySpace differs is that they are playing both sides of the fence, they are owned by a confessed conservative, and they aren’t in it to help candidates fundraise from the grassroots like ActBlue but rather

“to track and monitor online donations made to presidential candidates through its MySpace subsidiary, giving the media group an increasingly prominent role in the 2008 presidential election.” Financial Times

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Daily Kos (that SusanG was kind enough to rescue) about the funding gap between how the Right and Left nurture their next generation of leaders. Not surprisingly, the Republicans are outspending us by far. Just one conservative organization – The Leadership Institute (where Karl Rove and Ralph Reed first honed their chops) – received more money in 2004 than almost all Democratic youth groups combined.

In the comments to that post, a constructive conversation evolved in which it was suggested (among a number of other ideas) that we create an ActBlue page to fundraise for progressive youth groups. I created such a page right away, but there are problems with this idea. This blog is a follow up to that initial discussion. Below the jump you'll hear my thoughts on the most effective ways that the netroots can help youth groups on the money front.

Since the ideas contained in the rest of this post require a significant effort on the part of the netroots, this blog is cross-posted at Daily Kos and MyDD. I would also encourage everyone to go to those sites and take the poll that I set up and participate in the discussion on those sites (if any develops - the communities on those sites are notorious for dismissing blogs or programs dedicated to young voters).