millenials

• Ralph Reed launches web organization to mobilize young values voters.
• Millennials are learning to live a simpler lifestyle thanks to recession.
• Dept. of Education makes FAFSA less complicated.
• 26 Year Old Nico Pitney of HuffPo is Kind of a Big Deal, says the Stimulist.
• Millennials are permeating the leadership structure in the Democratic Party.
• Does 'Tiananmen + Web = Tehran'?
• Check out act.ly - Petitions via Twitter. Great idea.
• Calling All Youth Activists In L.A.: The Youngest Candidate Is The Film You Have To See!

• Boston Globe: Obama's change message still resonates with youth.
• Winograd and Hais wonder in the LA Times whether the Millennials are taking on the role of their grandparents.
• Allison Fine reports on the Case Foundation's Giving Challenge.
• United We Serve, the White House summer of service, kicked of Monday.
• YouTube and All For Good team up to connect video makers and nonprofits.
• Google + Data.gov + Gapminder Visualizations: Is this a game changer?
• Liberty University has decided that maybe their Young Democrats policy WAS a bit unfair.
• A profile of a few young campaign staffers from the Obama campaign and what they're planning to do in the future.

• The Public Lands Service Corps Act, which would create jobs rehabilitating national parks, clears the House Committee on Natural Resources.
• Ben Adler doesn't think much of James Carville's new book - or the irony of his newfound love of the youth vote.
• Sixteen-year old runs for City Council.
• College Repub leadership = 7 white dudes. Good luck building that "big tent."
• Graduate school for unemployed college students.
• Locating the impact of stimulus dollars, geographically and demographically.
• Democrats in Wisconsin look to youth for leadership.
• Another article speculating the length of progressive ascendancy, based on demographics.
• DREAM Act student will twitter her day in court.

• NY Times on the absurdities of corporate student lending.
• Honolulu's all digital election sees shockingly low turnout. What does this mean for voting reform?
• Campaign for America Future has a new report: America is a Center-Left Nation.
• The Prospect profiles the youngest House Democrat and Republican.
• Check out Ari Melber's take on Clinton's Pot, Obama's Cocaine and the job prospects of millennials.
• Nancy Lublin of The Huffington Post takes on the issue of lowering the voting age to 17.

• The White House opens "Office of Public Engagement.
• New research from Robert Putnam shows Gen Y and X moving away from organized religion.
• Generation Green: How green energy cost the GOP a generation of voters.
• LA Times Piece "GOP Ignores Young Millennials at its Peril".
• Town-Gown divide heightens in many college towns across the country thanks to economy.
• Newsweek's starting a new blog focusing on young voters who supported Obama in 2008.
• Kos shows that young voters place the GOP on the wrong side of same-sex partnerships.
• Gallup Poll: Democrats do Best Among Gen Y and Boomers. X is most conservative.
• The Next Right on the GOP's bleak future with young voters.

This blog is drawn from some writing I have in the mix for an upcoming article and was also prompted by a Future Majority post this past week titled Consensus, Millennial Politics, and the Common Good.

Bergerc84 kicked things off with the following line:

Peter Levine blogged about consensus today, and it got me thinking about Millennials, their affinity for collaboration, and how this impacts the current political environment.

His thoughts became my muse as well. Will a new generation that is prone to collaboration bring an end to decades of hostile culture wars, bitter partisanship, and relentless political gridlock? Will we too spend the vast majority of our political energy engaging in back-and-forth diatribes over the hot-button issues of abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and global warming? Or will our generation finally rise above, forge a working consensus, and move our nation forward?

Crossposted at Young Philly Politics

A couple of months back I mentioned that I had proposed and accepted a job doing political outreach and organizing with Philadelphians Against Santorum (PAS). Since then I have been completely overwhelmed with the work at hand and a big move back to Philly (I lived in Brooklyn for the past 8 years with my wife), so I wasn't able to write as much as I would have liked to (and lord knows I love to self-promote!). But now that things have come to an end (and what a sweet, sweet ending it was!) I wanted to tell you a bit about the program I ran through PAS, and give you some of my thoughts and experiences from this election cycle. Since I am still working to get my life back to a sense of normality, I still don't have a ton of time, so I am going to keep this post short, and expand on it over the next few days.

How it all started...
This past summer I worked for the amazing documentary The War Tapes, doing outreach to the netroots, web support, and bit of event planning. As the theatrical release was coming to an end, sometime late in the summer, I looked around at the lack of political groups working in Philly and I started to get really nervous that the left was once again poised to snatch defeat from the arms of victory. I only knew of one group- Philadelphians Against Santorum- that was doing any sort of field work in the city, and as far as I could tell there weren't any groups at all doing youth outreach, which really shocked me given the fact that Kerry owed his victory in PA during the 2004 Presidential Elections to the 2-1 advantage he received from people under 25 (every age group over 25 voted for Bush by a small margin). At around the same time I noticed that PAS was hiring for field organizers, and I shot PAS founder/Director Ray Murphy an e-mail to tell him that I was interested in working with/for them.

A week later I met with Ray and PAS' Assistant Director Jen Murphy (not related to each other or to Congressional candidate Lois or Congressional-elect Patrick) and listened to what they were trying to accomplish and how they thought that they could do so. Basically, Ray's plan was to knock on the doors of new and infrequent voters, call them on the phone, and make sure that they got their asses to the polls on election day (I'll let Ray explain it better, or check out some of the great press pieces that PAS received). The plan sounded good, but I knew where I could have the most effect, both in terms of this election and for builaing the Future Majority that we will need to fix the multitude of problems our generation faces (or will face in the near future) and it wasn't on some stranger's doorstep. What I proposed to Ray was to implement the political side of a project that I have been working on for over a year now (and which I continue to try and make into a reality), which is an adaptation of the model that Music for America uses to bring young people (like yours truly) into the network enabled left-leaning movement. Basically, I proposed that I work at every concert thrown by Philly's independent show promotion king-- Sean Agnew and his company R5 Productions-- as well as on campus, to register as many millenials as possible and persuade them to vote and vote Democratic through face-to-face encounters in spaces where they feel comfortable and at home.

Youth Outreach & Building a Future Majority
I could write an entire Masters Thesis on why focusing on young voters is paramount to any movement that strives for long-term success, why face-to-face interactions with a peer are extremely important to accomplish this, and why the connections between culture and politics need to be pointed out to young people, but as I said, I'm a bit short of time at the moment. Okay, that's a bit of a bad joke (if it wasn't for bad jokes, I wouldn't be able to tell any at all). I wrote my Master's Thesis on this exact subject (titled Keys to a Future Majority), which you can find here on Future Majority. Here are a few of the relevant sections that led me to believe that youth outreach was the most important activity that progressives could engage in:

I've had time to sift through what data is available, and just got off the media call held by Young Voter Strategies and CIRCLE. The bottom line is this - youth turnout increased yet again and millenials chose democrats over Republicans by 22 percentage points (60%-38%).

In Montana, where Jon Tester beat out Conrad Burns, I'm hearing that young voters made up 17% of the electorate and that their swing towards Democrats may have been the deciding factor in Tester's election.

If this is a wave election, that wave is being fueled by young voters and their growing allegiance to progressive politics.

Here's what we know so far based on exit polls, preliminary precinct reporting, and census data from March 2006:

Here's some preliminary info from CNN:

COMBINED CONGRESSIONAL BALLOT VOTE BY AGE
TOTAL Democrat Republican
18-29 (13%) 60% 38%
30-44 (24%) 53% 45%
45-59 (34%) 53% 45%
60+ (29%) 51% 47%

Ignore the 13% number. That is not a good indicator of overall turnout numbers. But check out that 60%! Millenials voted Democrat by 22% - more than double the advantage that they gave Kerry in 2004.

And yet again, we turned out to be more Democratic than any other generation. The Progressive Wave is coming, and its all about us Millenials.

YVS is releasing hard turnout numbers later today. I'll have a fuller post then.

Rather than post continuously as more exit polls are released and analyzed, I'm going to use this post to write rolling updates on new data. I'll write/post something comprehensive after the Young Voter Strategy media call tomorrow afternoon.

Update - 9:15 YVS is going to release more updates from exit polls at university precincts, but won't have any hard turnout numbers until tomorrow morning. So I'm taking the rest of the night to nurse my head cold. I'll be back tomorrow. Maybe I'll post again tonight if something really interesting rears its head.

Update - 7:15pm: YVS reports that their campus exit polls continue to show that turnout at Ohio State University and UW-Madison are surpassing 2002 levels.

I wish they had turnout numbers from non-university precincts too. I'm going to hunt around for some. Let me know if you find any.

6:15pm Young Voter Strategies just released their first projection of youth turnout, and it looks like turnout is up on campuses in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Maryland.

That's good news for Democratic Gubernatorial and Senate candidates like Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, Jennifer Granholm, Mike Hatch and Martin O'Malley.

Early numbers show significantly higher young voter turnout in a number of student-dense precincts; in fact, in four youth-dense precincts in Maryland, Michigan, and Ohio, student turnout at 2pm was already higher than the final vote count in that same precinct in 2002. Click here for the spreadsheet.

And in six of the University Wisconsin-Madison precincts (where tallies are reported by the hour), turnout at 11am was two to three times higher this year than at 11am in 2002. See chart below, and a news release from the PIRGs’ New Voters Project with more information and info on activities happening around the country. We’ll be gathering more precinct tallies and have additional information later in the evening.