Peer-to-Peer

As I mentioned yesterday, if Day 1 at YDA was all about internal business and caucuses (activities which do, btw, continue throughout the conference), then the second day was all about action. As I've written in the past, YDA is still undergoing a transformation from a networking organization that provided manual labor for state parties and candidates into a chapter-based field organization focused on peer-to-peer GOTV of the often neglected youth vote. Day 2 was all about pushing that peer-to-peer program. Here's Tony Cani, YDA's political director breaking it down:

As Tony explains, the vote pledges - and the establishment of metrics for attaining pledges on the state level - are the focus of the day. The pledge cards - which declare the signatory's intention to vote for a Democrat in the fall, is really just the entry point to a whole series of "touches" - via text message, facebook, phone calls and door-knocks - that end with the person pulling the lever for Obama in the fall. It's also a way for YDA National and YDA chapters to measure their work - providing valuable information about the capabilities of the organization as well as data that can be used for fundraising purposes during the next cycle.

Most of the day is structured around trainings in peer-to-peer- organizing as a way to gather vote pledges. These include community service projects (the Democrats Work model), concerts and festivals (the MFA/Head Count model), campus organizing, online organizing (with a focus on Facebook and state blogs) and more. The day was capped off with a field exercise in which 10 teams competed to gather the most vote pledges as possible - online and on the streets of downtown Nashville - in the span of one hour.

Not everyone was thrilled with this use of YDA time. As I've written before, not all YDA members and chapters are bought-in to the new, peer-to-peer model, and there seemed to be some resistance to the idea of the vote pledges. At the YDA conference I attended in New Hampshire last Novembe, at the YDA Fall Conference, very few attendees participated in the field trainings. Instead, many chose to ditch YDA and canvass for their preferred presidential campaign. This time around participation in field training activities seemed to be on the rise, though still below a majority of conference members. The culture of the organization - who it's members are and how they view YDA's place in Democratic politics - continues to change, but it seems like they're still a ways to go before everyone drinks the peer to peer Kool Aid.

This is probably the best "news" piece I've seen about how Sen. Obama is turning out young voters in record numbers. It's not just technology and it's not just star power. It's a real commitment to field organizing, and making sure that young people are targeting their fellow youth. In other words, it's all about the peer-to-peer organizing.

This is the real message that needs to get out there because this is the strategy that campaigns, the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC need to learn if they want to replicate Obama's successes in down-ballot races.

The program will air on Current TV tonight at 10pm Eastern. You can also grab it here.

Reporter: Mr. Harrison, with all that's going on in the world today, why did you decide to focus on this (Bangladesh)?"

George Harrison: "Because a friend asked me to help."

From a press conference for the Concert for Bangladesh, posted in a diary at The Daily Kos

The first show that I successfully volunteered for with Music for America was a huge rock festival on Randall’s Island in NYC, in July 2004. I was excited to see how MfA worked, and how I would work with it. I went online and read up on all of MfA’s “issues”; I was familiar with most- the insane War on Drugs, the skyrocketing costs of education and healthcare, reproductive and civil rights, and the importance of youth participation- but I wanted to get MfA’s take on each, which basically meant looking at the issues in terms of youth and culture.

The next day I made my way to the venue and met with the other volunteers. I was the only male volunteer, and at the ripe old age of 25 probably the oldest. We gathered up our materials and made our way through security and inside the massive grass and dirt fields that housed the festival. I was pretty nervous as we setup our materials and arranged the stacks of voter registration cards. Even though I usually don’t have any problems talking with strangers I generally don’t like going up to random people and trying to get them to talk politics with me. I’ve always been politically focused, and I’ve always felt contempt or boredom from many of the people I’ve tried to talk politics with, so I wasn’t exactly excited when I was given a clipboard full of registration sheets, a box of issue cards, and was asked by the volunteer coordinator to go out, along with four of the young women, to the long line that had formed outside of the grounds to talk with kids and register as many as possible. The girls didn’t seem as nervous as they jumped at the opportunity to go, which emboldened me a little, given my macho older-brother ego- I wasn’t about to let a couple of younger girls show me up!

I came onto Music for America’s forums to tell their Communications Director, Mike Connery, about the research that I had done, and to try and see if they’d be willing to help me apply it.

My idea was to create a multi-media CD that would replicate the agenda-setting and priming effects that Iyengar had demonstrated. I thought that if we could convince, trick, or bribe young people to take a look at a CD that contained multimedia relevant to the campaign, that we could have a huge effect on youth turnout. MfA had a huge outreach operation, was extremely well funded, and I thought that it had the ability, if it desired, to get such CDs into the hands of tens of thousands of young people.

Mike wasn’t convinced. He challenged me to justify a project on the scale I was talking about, forced me to consider production time and cost, and pushed me to solidify my ideas on how something like this could work. He did not dismiss me, even though he had never met me and didn’t know me at all. He engaged me, he challenged me, and he encouraged me to continue on, which I did.

Mike had two main criticisms of my ideas.