2010

Well, here we go again.

The New York Times published a story today out of Colorado looking at whether or not young voters could be turning away from the Democratic ranks -- two years after serving as one of the bedrock groups in Obama's voting coalition. The story seems to be fairly balanced in its views, as there are some younger voters proclaiming their continued allegiance to the President and the Democratic Party, but there are also young voters souring on the Democratic leadership.

One young voter was particularly descriptive in explaining her conflicted views.

Kristin Johnson, 23, like many other students interviewed here in recent days, said that a vote for Democrats in 2008, however passionate it was, did not a Democrat make. But she bristles just as much at the idea of being called a Republican.

“It’s like picking a team when you really don’t want to root for either team,” said Ms. Johnson, a communication studies major, who said she was undecided about parties and politics going into the general election campaign.

If Democrats are letting voters like Ms. Johnson get away from them across the country, the ramifications of this blunder will be felt for a long, long time. But that's another topic for another day.

I wanted to focus on another passage from the article, one that reflects exactly what we have been facing throughout the last few special elections and what we will be fighting back through November and beyond.

How and whether millions of college students vote will help determine if Republicans win enough seats to retake the House or Senate, overturning the balance of power on Capitol Hill, and with it, Mr. Obama’s agenda. If students tune out and stay home it will also carry a profound message for American society about a generation that seemed so ready, so recently, to grab national politics by the lapels and shake.

While Kirk Johnson, the writer of this piece, does not go into specifics as far as what he means by a "profound message," I think the odds are good that these few lines illuminate the common misunderstanding that Johnson and other journalists run with when writing these stories. They go with the surface level content, mindlessly reporting that youth did not show up at the polls and, thus, are not interested in voting. Apparently, we're just not prepared.

But what about the other possibility: perhaps youth, suckered into this idea that politicians - maybe just once - might care about our issues, might be willing to talk big, think big, dream big, and for once exercise some pragmatic idealism, are let down. After being counted on to move this Democratic administration and congressional leadership into power, perhaps we are pissed off and making a political statement by refusing to be taken for granted.

That's where this article falls short. There are other possibilities for why youth might not be voting. Not because we are apathetic, or turned off to politics. It's because politicians gave us their word, we gave them our vote, and aside from a watered down health care bill, a stimulus that was too small, and maybe a few other bills, the work hasn't been done, and the to-do list is getting longer. Furthermore, we are left hanging in the breeze, waiting for an honest explanation... still.. waiting.. for that honest explanation.

So don't get us wrong: we're still ready to shake some lapels. But in order to be most effective, we need candidates who are uncompromising in their tenacity on confronting big issues, but flexible in crafting solutions to our problems. And we need them to engage us.

Matt Bai's piece in the New York Times Magazine chronicles the emerging tensions between the White House and the Congress as they strategize for the 2010 mid-terms. Within the piece, Bai discusses the generational dynamic at play as the DNC (what is now the Obama-backed OFA) is pushing congressional candidates (against their wills) to make their pitches to voters normally perceived as unreliable.

...The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party’s candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it’s only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money — traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies — to courting volunteers and voters who haven’t generally been reliable Democrats.

This is not what members of Congress or their campaign managers are trained to do, and it has created something of a cultural chasm between the White House and the party apparatus. There is a strong generational component here. With some exceptions, Obama’s passion for organizing finds more enthusiasm among candidates closer to the president’s age and newer to politics (candidates like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado), while older Democrats have a harder time imagining that a bunch of volunteers and a dozen virtual town-hall meetings are going to matter more than labor endorsements and some killer 30-second spots...

[...]

By Democratic Party standards, this is a relatively muted internal disagreement. But it nonetheless points to the emergence of rival schools of thought within the party when it comes to Obama’s importance as a party leader. Some see him as having transformed both the electorate and the nature of campaigning in what could be a lasting and fundamental way, meaning that things are possible now — both in terms of liberal governance and winning elections — that did not seem possible before. Others view 2008 mostly as a cathartic election that had more to do with conditions in the country than with Obama’s peculiar magic, and they don’t think the party should assume that there are millions of new voters out there who can be tapped if you just knock on the right doors. These two worldviews coexist uneasily among the party’s elected officials and candidates, young and old, in every part of the country — sometimes just hours apart.

The congressional camp within the Democratic Party reflects the status quo that continues to claim that new voters -- including young voters -- don't vote and are apathetic. What they refuse to understand is that we are civically active; we do vote when we are genuinely engaged in a conversation about issues through a medium relevant to our lifestyles. These labor endorsements and "killer" television ads are almost as boring as network news these days. Instead, we should be investing in the peer-to-peer voting drives and organizing work that have already increased the youth vote for three straight elections. From Mike Connery's Journalist Cheat Sheet:

Tip #5: If you insist on reporting the same old story that young people vote at a lower rate than the rest of the electorate, then you have an obligation to also inform your readers/viewers/listeners that youth turnout has increased for 3 years straight, and is at its highest level in over a decade. You also have an obligation to note that in 2006 the youth vote swung a number of important federal races, including pushing Democratic candidates Jon Tester, Jim Webb, and Joe Courtney over the top.

Source: Historical voting patterns (pdf), Impact on Races (pdf), Midterm Turnout (pdf).

Tip #6: If you are going to report on low-turnout among young voters, you also have an obligation to note that young people face more barriers to voting than do older voters. We move more frequently, requiring us to re-register sometimes on a yearly basis, on campus we face a lack of voting machines and long lines, and many university towns actively discourage and try to prevent students from voting.

Source: League of Conservation Voters Education Fund

Tip #7: There are simple fixes to the problems outlined in #6 – election day and same-day registration and mail-in voting are two such fixes that can be applied at the state level. These have been proven to bump youth turnout by as much as 14%!!!!! It would be nice if you reported on them occasionally.

Source: CIRCLE

Tip #8: Young voters will participate if they are asked to, particularly by a peer. This is proven. But the system stopped asking long ago by removing resources and manpower away from young voter outreach. Only in recent years have organizations – and a few campaigns – begin to reengage young voters in any serious way. The result is three straight years in which youth turnout increased. In plain terms: young voters are not apathetic. Rather, the system fails to engage them in any meaningful way.

Source: Young Voter Strategies, Voter Mobilization Tactics

Tip #9: Stop reporting on “celebrity activism” as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the youth vote. This is a Boomer and Gen-X construction created for a broadcast TV culture of the 80s and 90s. Today’s young voters are interested in peer-to-peer communication and networked action. From Facebook to on the ground, peer to peer organizing at club, bars, barbershops and apartment canvassing, the most effective, and sustainable developments in youth organizing in the past five years have come from new, grassroots organizations doing peer to peer organizing on the ground or online. Stop reporting on celebrities and start doing the work of talking to and reporting on the activities of these organizations. Good places to start include:

Forward Montana, The Oregon Bus Project, New Era Colorado, Young Democrats of America, and The League of Young Voters.

There are many more, but let’s do this in baby steps. Start with these and we’ll work out way deeper into youth organizing together.

Young voters can be courted; it just takes some courage and genuine effort. The Speaker's office and legislators like Congressman George Miller (D-CA) have been great on youth policy issues, but in purely electoral terms, the Congressional campaign plan outlined above is disappointing. While OFA doesn't have a pristine record with young voters, they apparently get it more than many of the old guard congressmen and congresswomen.

UPDATE: An example of Congress not understanding youth priorities or youth culture today? Ike Skelton, a longtime Democratic congressman, provides one:

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Tuesday that he thought the military should keep its ban on openly gay service members in part because he did not want to open a national discussion about homosexuality. The chairman, Representative Ike Skelton, a conservative Missouri Democrat, said he thought the debate in Congress over the proposed repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy might force families to explain homosexuality to their children. “What do mommies and daddies say to their 7-year-old child?” Mr. Skelton asked reporters at a news media breakfast.

A Pew Research poll released this week showed that Democrats may be losing their grip on Millennials.

The Democratic advantage over the Republicans in party affiliation among young voters, including those who "lean" to a party, reached a whopping 62% to 30% margin in 2008. But by the end of 2009 this 32-point margin had shrunk to just 14 points: 54% Democrat, 40% Republican.

Cue the pundits - even those young Obamaphiles are realizing the dangers of liberalism, right? While some local outlets are probably lazily reporting it this way, we're actually seeing quite the opposite.

Pew's research still shows a heavy tilt toward many liberal stances among Millennial respondents, particularly in the areas of expansion of government responsibility, favoring gay marriage, and resisting the continued military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Futhermore, Millennials are the only generation in the study to have more respondents identify as "liberal" then "conservative." 29 percent identified themselves as "liberal" while 27 percent identified as conservatives.

(We know that the whole notion that youth are liberal until they grow older is, to borrow the British term, poppycock. Research shows that when youth vote for a certain party or form certain political ideologies when they come of age, they tend to keep that voting behavior/ideology over time, despite what many people might think.)

With all this taken into account, young voters are growing disenchanted with the Democratic Party because right now it represents politics as usual. It's not because we fear Democratic liberalism; it's the opposite -- we want more of it! To get it, we need our senators and representatives to find some fortitude somewhere and get moving. The public option resurgence is something to rally around, but it faces formidable challenges in Congress, one of those being Democratic skittishness given the party's lackluster performances in the VA and NJ gubernatorial elections and the special election in Massachusetts.

The bottom line is that as long as Democratic representation in Congress follows a centrist line, it will not be representing the interests and values of the Millennials, leaving more Democratic defections among the demographic likely. 2010 is too important for that.

This week Chris Bowers over at Open Left predicts that the voters upon which Barack Obama depended in 2008, a large bloc being young voters, will fail to turn out this November. Bowers grounds his argument in what he calls "long-term civic trends" that show "drop-off voters" participating in presidential elections and failing to go to the polls just two years later. Bowers contends that the importance of young voters to Obama's coalition will exacerbate this situation come Election Day, as youth consistently form a smaller share of the vote in midterm elections compared to presidential elections (for information on "share" versus "turnout," please read the first bullet point here). Thus, Bowers calls for a strategy of persuasion as opposed to mobilization.

I disagree with Bowers. In covering youth political participation, one quickly identifies the chicken-egg nature of the topic. Politicians and parties believe youth cannot and will not be politically engaged, so many of the ads, phone calls, and messages are tailored to older voters, alienating the youth demographic. When youth do not turn out after politicians largely ignore them, the media, pundits, parties, and candidates express disappointment in young voters for failing to engage. Thus, youth naturally view electoral politics with cynicism.

In unquestionably consuming the line that youth won't turn out without unearthing why this might be, we perpetuate the cycle. In a tough political environment thus far, with 435 House races this November and over 30 Senate campaigns, it's going to be easy this cycle for timid and weak Democratic incumbents and their consultants to stick their fingers in their mouths, hold them out in front of them, and avoid making tough decisions. And with the GOP disgusting young voters, Republicans have little incentive to target youth. Accepting this as inevitability is what gets us to this situation in the first place, because it doesn't shine the light on the ineffectiveness of this stale strategy. The result is an electorate that's older, more moralistic, and polarized. Boomer-like ideological strength is at the heart of midterms, not Millennial problem solving. Thus, I heartily disagree with Bowers' resigned argument because it reflects the hegemony that silences youth and leads to more of the same in our political dialogue, which we can no longer afford.

Perhaps if candidates were to truly engage youth in medium (use up-to-date technological communication) and message (a strong, progressive discussion of the economy, higher education, climate crisis, and national service framed in a problem-solving approach) and possess a strong record of consistent conviction, they might respond. Furthermore, youth suffer from a lack of access, not apathy. When young people are registered to vote, they turn out. For example, according to the US Census, 81.6% of all registered young voters actually cast a ballot in 2004. That is on par with other portions of electorate.

It's not going to be easy. It's harder to register/inspire a younger group of people to vote when they are collectively facing over 500 decisions without a headlining candidate/campaign at the top. But it won't be as hard if we're willing to challenge our candidates' conventional campaign strategies.

Bowers is right on one thing -- young voters do form the heart of Obama's base. Unlike Bowers, though, I argue that 2010 is so important, our issues are so pressing, and our demographic is so critical to Democratic success that there's no choice but to view this as a mobilization struggle. Political interest is at an all-time high among youth; to capitalize, we must recalibrate our campaigns to attract the support of young people.

For those of you undergraduate students looking for a great summer internship, check out The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network's posting below:

The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network’s Summer Academy combines a full-time, paid internship with a training curriculum and weekly networking events as part of an integrated program of leadership development. Our objective is to bring new, diverse, and progressive voices into the political process, and we pair these young leaders with progressive partner organizations that will task them with substantive, policy-related work. This highly selective program is open to all undergraduate students and runs for ten weeks, from June 3rd to August 12th, 2010. If you are interested in applying, visit the Roosevelt website. The deadline to apply is February 26th.

This opportunity is great in that 1.) it is with a great youth-driven organization; 2.) it's a terrific opportunity to get your progressive voice heard; 3.) it's an awesome chance to build relationships with colleagues in other progressive organizations and work with them to advance progressive policies.

Here is the application on their website.

Peter Daou's piece on the Huffington Post today argues that Democrats have hurt themselves by creating the convergence of the extreme right wing and progressive activists and bloggers. Governing from a lack of grounded principles, writes Daou, makes the president, and thus Democrats, look weak regardless of the legislation passed.

The half of Peter's argument positing that Democrats whiffed on the decision to legitimize Rush Limbaugh by repeatedly taking him on from the Press Room of the White House is on point. Robert Gibbs ridiculed any little comment Limbaugh (or Beck or Michael Savage or other conservative hacks) made. Daou actually wrote the following back in March.

There's precious little benefit in making Limbaugh more of a central player, in engaging him directly from the White House podium, in raising his stature, in stamping, sealing and approving the years he's spent bashing his political opponents. There was a moment, a brief moment, after Barack Obama was elected president, a moment long gone, where the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity could have become marginalized, bit players rather than media movers and shakers, the detritus of a sorry era. But instead, they have been granted more power -- out of some contrived political calculus. This, at a time when we don't need political calculus, we need single-minded determination to get us out of this economic calamity and to restore sanity to our government.

I agree with Daou, with some additional perspective offered. The Obama campaign came into DC following one of the best campaigns ever run. They were disciplined, they knew their message, and nearly every risk they took played well in the end. Part of their "change" message entailed changing Washington, refusing to get into the trenches against the "vast right wing conspiracy." Reviewing where we were then and where we are now, something obviously pushed the Obama administration off track.

I think Daou makes a strong argument that part of it lies within the Obama administration's decision to attempt to use Limbaugh et al. as their punching bags. But I think we have to zoom out one more level and ask: if Obama and Co. wanted to change the way elections are run, why would they violate their principles on right wing crazies? Attacking a group with such little credibility does little for the change message. The message of unconventional, but actual change transformed into the slimy politics of old.

Furthermore, the Obama administration looks even weaker when we juxtapose their toughness against the extreme right-wing commentators with their mealy-mouthed approach to health care, the agenda item forming the heart of Obama's domestic policy.

There's quite a bit of advice entering the public forum today, so I'll offer my two cents as well. The Democrats need to get back to what works, and that's offering a politics that solves America's problems from a coherent, ideological set of principles. In addition, they need to communicate with their base, especially those young voters who put him over the top in 2008 (and the millions more who will be voting in 2012), to keep them posted on exactly what is going on and how they can help support the Obama agenda moving forward.

The reality is that the Democrats still have 59 seats in the Senate. As Jon Stewart explained the other night, the Democrats still have more seats in the Senate than Republicans had when Bush was able to do whatever the hell he wanted.

This week's Daily Kos tracking poll provided a sign that we are in for a very rocky midterm election if the once-formidable Obama coalition doesn't assemble.

Voter Intensity: Definitely + Probably Voting/Not Likely + Not Voting

Republican Voters: 81/14
Independent Voters: 65/23
DEMOCRATIC VOTERS: 56/40

Yes, Republicans are naturally going to be more enthusiastic about voting now, just like Democrats were when W was in office. But this should be a huge warning sign, especially to those of us working with young voters, which are becoming the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.