Alexandra Acker

Young Democrats of America had a scheduled conference call this afternoon on GOTyV strategies and best practices with a special appearance by Sen. Hillary Clinton, and I thought I'd share a bit about what was discussed.

YDA Political Director Tony Cani and YDA Executive Director Alexandra Acker both opened the call by discussing best practices for getting out the youth vote, as well as describing the YDA GOTV efforts in eight states. Both discussed the success of YDA's "Young Voter Revolution" campaign, which has created over 100,000 peer-to-peer contacts so far during this campaign.

The "best practice" emphasized the most was simply engaging friends and neighbors about the election, as each person definitely has the ability to play that part. Cani noted that many activists can get wrapped up in activities on the front lines and in campaign offices and forget about talking to those that are not as involved.

Other best practices included staying away from negative appeals and visualizing/planning the casting of the ballot. Cani noted that Millennials are turned off by language like, "Young people may not usually vote, but..." Instead, to jibe with the Millennials' desire to be a part of something bigger, the current collective participation by this generation should be emphasized. Acker then stepped in to discuss the importance of getting young people to visualize the process of casting a vote. Acker explained that this can be done through vote pledges and probing questions asking youth where they're going to vote, how they're going to get there, and when during the day they will do so. The intention is to assist young voters in planning their day around voting; this has proven to be successful in the past.

YDA officers are currently in eight states: Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, California, Florida, Georgia, Utah, and Virginia. Acker outlined the efforts in a few of the states to give call participants a glimpse into what is happening on the ground.

• California: Local chapters have organized in Northern California to form a collaborative canvassing effort based out of Stockton, largely focused on rural areas. Acker noted that this was yielding the best quantitative results, saying that California's numbers were great and making it hard for any of the other efforts to compete.
• Colorado: The effort out of Boulder may be a bit surprising, Acker noted, because with Boulder containing the University of Colorado, the area is usually known as a "bastion of liberalism" within Colorado. Acker explained that even though this is usually the case, they weren't seeing much partisan activity on the ground. The YDA stepped in to strengthen GOTyV efforts for non-college youth.
• Arkansas and Utah: While neither state has been or will be a player in the presidential campaign, both states have YDA staff on the ground for several local races, in a primarily phone-based operation.

Before Sen. Clinton joined in, Cani reminded callers of YDA's voting reminder text messaging service. Youth can text "Vote Dem" to 35328 and get a reminder to vote on Election Day. Cani referenced the data showing that text message reminders improve turnout by nearly 5% (Mike wrote about this here).

Cani also explained a bit about the activity we would be seeing from YDA after the election. In odd-numbered years, YDA traditionally focuses on issue advocacy programs, and following this cycle, Cani said it wouldn't be any different. YDA will be providing support to Democratic legislators and other influential people by researching a few hand-picked issues deemed priorities by the organization.

Senator Clinton joined in after finishing a campaign event for Democratic candidate Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky. Clinton emphasized the importance of voting down-ballot among youth, pointing out that recent data showed 1 in 5 youth fail to vote in the local elections. Clinton expressed thanks for the support shown to both Sen. Obama's campaign and to her campaign in the primaries, but then said "we're in the World Series now," and that we must execute and get the job done.

Clinton fielded one question from a YDA member -- "What is the best way to keep people involved after the election, especially since we'll need lots of help with the problems we're facing?"

Clinton said that Democrats need an engaged, active Democratic National Committee to reach out to civic clubs in local communities and hold forums on campuses and discuss what the Democrats will be doing to solve the nation's problems. Sen. Clinton also reminded callers of the importance of recruiting good Democratic candidates for 2010 and 2012.

How could this be?! This is indeed breaking news, because it may very well be the first time FoxNews has done something right - er... correctly.

This comes on the heals of the CNN blunder in reporting a lot of misinformation about young people and the youth vote in 2008. Add to that Naomi Wolf and Courtney Martin and you're ready for your own nuclear meltdown of frustration.

There's been a pretty substantial rapid response linking to a brilliant post by Mike that details data and a fact sheet for reporters who can't bring themselves to research - and the response has been tremendous!

Rob Anderson from CP went after Naomi at the Washington Post, we hit CNN on FM, and Campus Progress nailed Courtney here.

After posting Mike's piece everywhere and emailing it to CNN, NPR, and all of my own local news and radio stations I figured the last to talk about young people would be a Republican News Network who so clearly excludes young people. But they did. As you can see they addressed all of our main issues.

The only fault I have with this is that the piece likens youth to phrases like "Yo Dude" when, shocking as it may seem, young people do have a capability to converse like adults and understand complex topics.

Alexandra Acker ED of the Young Democrats of America was interviewed in the piece and later commented to me

"One thing that stood out was Frank Luntz’s outrageous statement that young people want to be addressed as “Yo, dude” whereas I had spoken about the need for candidates to take young voters seriously and talk about issues they care about."

Another interesting thing to mention is the ways in which FoxNews reaches out to young commentators like Acker when CNN's and the piece on 60 Minutes was largely dominated by older generations who are out of touch with the reality of the Millennial Generation.

Fox is notorious for connecting with younger demographics (see MySpace, the Simpsons, and FoxNews Porn) - CNN's only got Anderson Cooper and Soledad O'Brien. Let's face it almost 3/4 of their airwaves are full of old angry Lou Dobbs, Larry "he's still alive?" King, and the Jack/Wolf Playdate (and my TV is always on CNN!)

The reporter doing the piece seemed young. Probably not 25, but she's definitely younger than Lou Dobbs. And Acker said she made a real effort to understand the issues:

She "went to resources like YDA and YVS, did follow-up with me after the interview to make sure she had the Harvard quote right, but CNN just recycled the same old, tired storyline."

Acker goes on to speculate that the youth friendly ways in which FoxNews and its family targets young people is perhaps because they are more aware of our generation's purchase power. And I think she's got something there.

While I agree that Fox is bad, evil, worse than bad and evil, I think if they could make more money by supporting Democrats they'd flip parties in a heartbeat. By targeting young people, regardless of party affiliation, with products, musicians, and the like their advertisers make more money and thus the network banks a pretty sweet deal.

In many ways we're being used - but at the same time, they're the only ones talking about the importance of young people in the first place - so what do ya do?

Until we can get mainstream news sources to report these facts correctly, you have to give props to the ones who do, even when they're traditionally crazy nutbars.

Cross posted to Kos, please recommend