YouthRoots

Cross posted at MyDD. Please recommend.

One of the things I want to do through the course of this primary is track the "youthroots," or "under 30" grassroots organizing on behalf of candidates - campus groups, high school groups, or other identified youth groups (like Punx for Dean in '04). I want to not only track these groups, but look at how they organize their members, how they coordinate with each other, and how they coordinate with the "official" youth operations of the campaigns. The end goal being to compare, contrast, and establish best practices for youth outreach.

As a start to that project, I've compiled a list of all the groups I could find for each candidate based on some simple Google searches (candidate name + youth, student, teen, high school), a look at the blogrolls/links, and some quick surfing on MySpace and FaceBook. I'll follow it up with emails to the administrators of all those groups and report back the results later this week along with some more thoughts as to who's youthroots are organizing most effectively and why. If you are part of - or know of - any other youthroots that I'm missing for any candidate, please add a link in the comments.

There are some preliminary thoughts based on initial observations offered throughout the post.

As the Democratic presidential primary begins, candidate websites are coming online. Politicians are starting to take notice of young voters, and some are starting to build a base among millenials. With that added attention comes new programs – many of which attempt to leverage social networks and new technologies to reach out to the millennial generation.

As these programs and websites launch, I'm going begin writing reviews of these efforts. These will be honest critiques of both design and program aspects of the candidates' youth outreach efforts. They are not intended to be mean-spirited or snarky swipes at politicians who don't get it. I hope that these will be read more as strategy memos meant to help candidates increase their support among young voters. I don't really have a horse in the race yet, so my biases are small and I hope to keep them out of these reviews. At the end of the day, it's all about increasing the ability of Democrats to engage Millennial.

First up in this series is Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who this week launched YouthRoots, the youth arm of his Forward Together PAC.

The website basically consists of four chunks: Video/Feature Content, Sign-up/Action, Testimonials, Links. I'll tackle each chunk separately, providing review of what's good, what's bad, and what's missing.