Texas

The DNC Youth Council has announced three more trainings for the state delegate election process. If you don't want to get cut, you might want to get on this call:

Subject: Upcoming DNC Youth Council Delegate Selection Trainings

Friends and Colleagues--

One of the goals of the DNC's Youth Council is to increase the number of young delegates (those under 36) to the Democratic National Convention. We have already held several conference call trainings on the process to be a delegate. The trainings were extremely successful and we are eager to get underway with our next round of calls.

Below one will find a listing of some of our upcoming calls. Please spread the word to as many people as possible about these. On each call we will be joined by a member of that respective state's party to go over the process to be a Congressional District, PLEO, or At-Large delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In addition to the specific training, we will be sure to provide information on how to get more involved with the State Party and other youth organizations. (If you or your organization have specific information you would like to have mentioned, please email me and let me know as soon as possible.)

The upcoming calls are:

Vermont - Thursday, April 17 at 7pm EST

Phone: 866-810-8093
Code: 822-976-6817

North Carolina - Tuesday, April 22nd at 6pm EST
Phone: 605-475-6006
Code: 792994

Texas - Monday, April 28 at 7pm EST
Phone: 605-475-6300
Code: 85383

I have to say, this is getting exhausting, covering the primary, but last night brought more good news for youth vote advocates and young people fighting for their voice to be heard.

According to CIRCLE, the youth vote tripled in Texas yesterday, with over 620,000 young people going to the polls, despite reports that many young people experienced difficulties in casting their ballots. Youth turnout in the Lonestar state hit 17%, up from 6% in 2000, and the youth share of the electorate was 15%, up from 9% in 2000.

In Ohio, almost 480,000 young voters went to the polls - nearly double the amount from 2000. The Ohio youth turnout rate was 25%, up from 15% in 2000 and confirming my suspicion that Ohio would have a higher than average turnout rate. The youth share of the Ohio electorate was 15%, up from 11% in 2000.

In both states young voters participated in the Democratic primary over the GOP primary at a rate of 2.6 to 1, continuing the trend set in almost every other contest thus far (Oklahoma and Utah being the exceptions).

As in most of the previous contests, young voters overwhelmingly chose Sen. Obama over Senator Clinton. In Ohio he captured the youth vote 61 - 35 percent. In Texas he won by a slimmer 58 - 42 percent.

Despite these wins, Clinton seems to have recaptured what little base she has among youth - non college, low income, and young Latinos. In each category Clinton erased the gains made by Senator Obama during the Potomac Primaries just a few weeks back and won those demographics.

Less data is available for Vermont and Rhode Island (CIRCLE was not able to attain the necessary data to crunch the numbers), but here's what we know from the CNN exit polls. In Rhode Island, young voters made up 13% of the electorate - up from 8% in 2004 - and Sen. Obama capture the youth vote 53 - 47 percent. In Vermont, young voters were 11% of the electorate, a slight increase over their 10% share in 2004. As in other states, they chose Obama 64 - 31%.

Still no nominee, but the surge in youth participation continues, particularly in the two states where the candidates expended the most effort to get out the vote, and young voters continue to choose Democrats over Republicans by more than 2 - 1. Good news for November, whoever the nominee will be.

Tomorrow is Junior Super Tuesday - Sen. Clinton's final firewall, if you believe it. In Texas, both campaigns are courting the growing latino youth vote, and in Ohio, Sen. Obama has indie rock stars pumping up his already uber-energized youth supporters. He may need that extra support if prediction of snow storms blanketing the state tomorrow turn out to be true.

Here's a quick look at the demographic breakdowns of the youth vote in Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island. As per usual, expect youth turnout to be somewhere between the 2004 primary share of the electorate and the current share of eligible voters. If trends hold, somewhere about 4 - 5% higher than 2004 primary results is a good guess, though Ohio has been a highly targeted and competitive state in recent years and turnout might be slightly higher there.

Everyone is looking at Texas and Ohio as the make-or-break states for Clinton, and in both states she has a greater than usual advantage among young voters. Young latinos, who have been more likely to support her campaign that than of Sen. Obama, are 33% of the youth electorate in Texas, and young voters as a whole are almost one quarter of the electorate overall. Most polls are projecting a slight Obama win, but they are really all within the margin of error. Leveraging young latinos to chip away Obama's base might be Clinton's key to sneaking out a victory in the Lone Star state.

In Ohio, young voters are less likely than usual to be in college or hold a college degree. Non-college youth have been turning out in far fewer numbers than their college educated peers, but when they do turn out it has tended to be for Clinton, giving her a chance to rack up a higher than expected delegate count in the state.

So Clinton stands to do better in those two states among young voters than she normally does, but the question is does it matter? Most analysts are reporting that the delegate math doesn't favor her, and it's not clear at all that there's any successful path to the nomination at this point barring a massive revolt against Obama among the super delegates.

Warning - all the state named links are to pdf files.

Ohio

2004 Share of Primary Electorate: 9%
2008 Share of the Population: 21%
Total Youth Population: 1,750,179
White non-Hispanic: 83%
Black non-Hispanic: 12%
College Students: 18%

Texas

2004 Share of Primary Electorate: 10%
2008 Share of the Population: 24%
Total Youth Population: 3,557,968
White non-Hispanic: 49%
Black non-Hispanic: 14%
Hispanic/Latino: 33%
College Students: 19%

Vermont

2004 Share of Primary Electorate: 10%
2008 Share of the Population: 20%
Total Youth Population: 94,496
White non-Hispanic: 94%
College Students: 28%

Rhode Island

2004 Share of Primary Electorate: 8%
2008 Share of the Population: 22%
Total Youth Population: 166,116
White non-Hispanic: 82%
Other: 19%
College Students: 24%

Karl-Thomas Musselman has a great diary over at the Burnt Orange Report asking "wtf happened to all those Ron Paul youth supporters?"

As a basis for his diary, Karl points to a Ron Paul rally held on a University of Texas campus recently. The rally had 4,000 attendees, but produced only 54 votes for Dr. Paul in early voting on campus.

I've noted in the past that Ron Paul has repeatedly come in 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th place among 18 - 29 year olds in the Republican primaries, and I don't think he's ever broken 20% among conservative youth in a given primary or caucus. Why is that so?

It would be hugely interesting to see a post-mortem analysis comparing the Obama and Ron Paul youth field campaigns . . . or even some decent polling asking why conservative youth cast their ballots for a specific candidate.

Quick hits for a lazy Saturday. Look for an announcement here tomorrow.

• Are today's teenage girls the next generation of online organizers? Looks like it. A new study from PEW shows that young girls are more likely than boys to be online content creators (35% vs. 20%). The one exception is online video, which is still an area in which boys participate at twice the rate of young girls.
• In anticipation for March 4th, Sen. Obama is wooing young Latinos in Texas, trying to take a bite out of his opponents base. The senator was at UT Pan American this week speaking with students about his education plan.
• Hat tip to Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired for tipping me off to Hillary Speaks to Me, a grassroots video project designed to showcase Sen. Clinton's support among young Americans (from 4 - 35 looks like a descriptive range). The site is one of the most authentically bottom up efforts in support of Senator Clinton that I've seen. The creators say that it's not "too little too late," but I have to disagree. This would have been good to see eight or nine months ago, but at this point it is overshadowed by the sheer volume of quality user generated content clogging the tubes in support of Sen. Obama.
• At WireTap, Future Majority friend and researcher for CIRCLE Karlo Barrios Marcelo explains why three is the magic number.

Here's a video of yesterday's march in Prairie View Texas in support of student voting rights. Warning, the sound is a bit loud:

I've been remiss in posting about this. As reported at the Houston Chronicle and Burnt Orange Report, earlier today, over 2,000 students from Prairie View A&M marched 7 miles from campus to the county courthouse to both cast an early ballot in the Texas primary and protest student disenfranchisement in Waller county.

The story is this - in January the county made a decision to radically reduce the number of early polling locations in the county to one. This was not a surprise. The county has a long history of voter suppression of students and people of color. This is from an email I received earlier:

• Supreme Court case that ruled against the county in 1979 where students at PVAMU were forced to take a questionnaire about personal questions in order to vote in Waller.
• In 1993 19 students were indited (charges were later dropped) for voter fraud as they lead massive voters registrations efforts on the campus of PVAMU.
• In 2004 the District Attorney told the students that they would be fined or could face jail time if they registered to vote in Waller County. The Attorney General of Texas intervened and the students were able to register.
• In 2006 Black Youth Vote!, The PVAMU student government association and a local county judge lead a registration effort to register hundreds of students on the campus and none of those students were on the rolls to vote for the mid-term elections. Apparently there was a "scandal" in the elections office and the matter was under investigation by the same office (district attorney's office) that told the students that they could not vote two years earlier.
• During the summer of 2007 Judge Dewayne Charleston had pledged to walk from PV to Austin in protest of the non-response from the Office of the Attorney General. This lead to roughly 300 students names (from the stack that was never put on the rolls in 2006) to be placed on the voting rolls in Waller county.
• Now (2008), the County is proposing to close all the early voting locations in the city of Prairie View with the university alone having over 8000 students and PVAMU being the largest employer in the county.
• The new proposal llocations for 3 days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) are still inadequate because students are not in town on weekends and it seems like a band aid to a SERIOUS problem with CONSISTENT student voter disenfranchisement in Waller and there has to be an outside intervention to protect the integrity of the elections for the students.

The response has been building for a while. The Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law took up the case on behalf of the students, the Obama campaign also supported the students - writing the Department of Justice on their behalf, registering about 3,000 young voters in the area, and providing water for the march.

The county gave in somewhat once the students announced today's march, though many were unsatisfied with their response. The county agreed to open three extra - and temporary - early voting locations over the weekend, but many students are away from school from Friday through Sunday, making this a less than adequate response on their part.

From a letter written by LCCR to the Department of Justice:

Waller County proposes temporary early polling sites in three locations within the county (Hockley, Pairie View, and Brookshire) for a two-day period, February 22 - 23, 2008. With regard to Prairie View, this two-day period would provide the students at Prairie View A & M University with a diminished opportunity to vote. Rather than conduct voting at the temporary voting site in Prairie View during the week, as has been done in the past, the County has proposed voting there on Friday and Saturday, two days when we have been told by members of the community that the students generally leave campus. The fact that this change was proposed without the input of the minority community in Prairie View combined with the history of voting discrimination within the county, gives the impression that the County is willfully trying to minimize, to the extent possible, the opportunity for the Prairie View students to vote; an action taht would be in line with past attempts to deter students from voting.

Bottom line - the students won some concessions, and today's turnout was impressive, but voter suppression is still happening. The Texas primary is on Tuesday March 4th. Early voting in the state began today.

I'm still working on my piece on the YDA/CDA super delegates, but wanted to alert you to these two stories:

First, TPM Cafe reports that Obama is up on the radio in Texas with a spanish-language ad aimed at young Latinos. By and large, Hillary has won the latino vote, and this is a pretty smart move for Obama looking to cut into her lead by picking up more points with his own base - younger voters. Here's a translation of the ad:

Clip from Barack Obama: "There is not a liberal American and a conservative America; there is the United States of America."

Barack Obama is talking to me.

He's faced many of the same challenges that we've faced in my family.

His parents weren't rich, but through hard work, he earned a scholarship and found his way — graduating from Harvard Law School.

And instead of accepting job offers that paid a lot of money, Obama decided to work with churches, giving a helping hand to those less fortunate in his community.

Clip from Barack Obama: In this election, in this moment, let us reach for what we know is possible.

Obama is talking to me.

About the opportunity to go to college … and about ensuring my parents and grandparents have the health care they need.

That's why I'm talking to others — my parents, my uncles, and my friends — because politics isn't just for those who like to fight, it's for those who want to build a better future.

Obama is talking to me, and he's talking to you too.

BO: I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message.

Second, Paul Krugman notes on his blog today that the subprime lending/credit pinch we're in is starting to impact providers of student loans, with bad results for students who rely on loans to meet their tuition:

Yesterday, the Michigan Higher Education Student Loan Authority, a state agency, said on its Web site that “due to the current and unprecedented capital-markets disruption” it will stop making loans under the state’s Michigan Alternative Student Loan, or MI-Loan, program. More than 100 Michigan colleges and universities participate in the program.

Over the past several weeks, I've been seeing posts on many a-list blogs pushing the narrative that "Kinky Friedman is a racist," or at least that "Kinkey is Pat Buchannan in a more colorful garb." Having some familiarity with Friedman as a cultural figure and as such taken some interest in his independent campaign for Governor, I was alarmed to see these posts.

My alarm turned to something more like disappointment and resignation though when I dug a little deeper and figured out this was a pretty poorly constructed negative campaign, trying to swing support to Democratic candidate Chris Bell, and that many of the people I enjoy and respect in the NetRoots were participating.

This coordinated negative push is mis-conceived and will be unproductive.

Living Liberally vs. Politically Correct
One of the better concepts to come out of the NetRoots is the "Living Liberally" meme. The idea here is that a liberal/progressive movement needs both a social foundation for its base, and an attractive/enjoyable culture to grow. This is a keen insight, and it's one of the things that makes the Drinking/Laughing/Screening Liberally family of events so valuable.

What's confusing and distressing to me is why people who understand the value of that can't see how they undermine the same process by participating in this negative campaign against Friedman.