Bus Project

Happy Holidays. Here's what's caught my eye this week:

• The Washington Independent notes that Obama's energy policy is being driven by (young) green votes.
• AlterNet asks, Will the youth movement save the labor movement?
• Daily Kos has data that Join the Impact's anti-Prop 8 protests have changed enough minds in California that the ballot measure would not pass a second time. And they have data to prove it. That's an effective use of the protest model.
• The National Journal credits young voters with Obama's win, noting that his advantage among Millennials is bad news for the longterm health of the GOP. Generation We, YDA and others get good play in this excellent article.
• Oregon local news notes that young people were elected to the state legislature in droves this year, doubling their numbers within the Democratic caucus. Jefferson Smith, one of the founders of the Bus Project, is one of those new Young Elected Officials and he is quoted in the article.
• Netcentric Advocacy gives us the Obama campaign by the numbers. Interesting stats here.
• This is a must read. In the Huffington Post, Jake Brewer of the Energy Action Coalition, son of a GM worker, gives a heartbreaking and insightful account of the state of the auto industry. Word on the street is that this piece is getting read by GM execs.
• MySpace and Change.org are partnering with a number of other youthy and techie c3s to ask for your ideas on what President Obama should do once he takes office. They've got a cool Digg-style site set up to rate ideas, which must be no more than 250 words in length.
• The Obama Transition Team wants your ideas on healthcare.
• The Daily Kos empire expands with the launch of Congress Matters, a new blog that will track what's going on in Congress and offer activists and regular citizens information on how they can most impact the policy process.
• Danah Boyd and some other smarties have finished a three year ethnographic study of digital youth. This should be interesting.
• Engaged Youth has a post up about the "Activism Style of Millennials."
• At Tech President, Micah Sifry interviews Marshall Ganz about Obama's field operation and the upside and dangers of Obama as the first President backed by a full-fledged movement.

The election was seven days ago and I'm starting to get emails from various organizations announcing their victories/contributions. This is not even close to a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of each group, but it's nice to give people a shout out, and it's a good look at what the youth vote world is saying about itself. We will see more rigorous assessments of individual programs as people like David Nickerson, Gerber and Green, etc. start crunching real data. And between now and the inauguration I plan to spend time talking to the major youth groups and writing up individual pieces on each organization's efforts. For now, here's a small taste of what went on in 2008:

Oregon Bus Project

• Bus Project Foundation registered 23,000 new young voters this year, increasing the Oregon youth electorate by 7 percent.
• Bus Trips knocked on over 60,000 doors this year, and is sure to have an impact on Oregon's 2009 legislature. This is double the number of doors per targeted district than in 2006. Quothe a razor's edge state rep candidate today: "I wouldn't be in this race if it weren't for the Bus."
• All told, 7 of the 10 candidates given 1000+ knocks of Bus volunteer support are winning their races, with one more too close to call.
• Trick or Vote was a huge success with 35% of the participants indicating that the event was their first political volunteering experience.
• We know The Bus Federation, working in five western states, has helped reach hundreds of thousands of doors with over 10,000 volunteer engagements.
• The 2009 (Oregon State Legilsative) session will see ten members age 35 and under -- the largest cohort of young legislators in state memory. Of the five new young legislators, two serve on the Bus' board of directors and four have volunteered extensively with the organization.
• After hundreds of thousands of Bus Project "Whole Ballot" contacts - the undervote dropped dramatically. Only 3% fewer votes have been tallied in the incredibly close Merkley v. Smith Senate race than in the historic Presidential race. Compare that to a 14% undervote from the top of the ticket in Merkley's tightly-contested primary race.

Young Democrats

• YDA contacted a record 150,000 young voters in eight key states. Thousands of Young Dems mobilized their peers all over the country.
• Over 1,300 paid canvassers, street teams, and volunteers worked to get out the youth vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.
• Our Young Voter Revolution campaigns targeted young voters and members in all 50 states but focused on Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Utah, and Virginia.

Head Count

• Its 2008 voter registration campaign yielded 105,697 registrations, constituting the largest event-based voter registration campaign in the United States.
• The group more than doubled its voter registration total compared to the previous presidential election by registering voters at more than 1,000 concerts and staging extensive online and college-based initiatives. Of all the voters HeadCount registered this year, over half were age 24 or younger, and three-quarters were under the age of 30, establishing the organization as a leader in galvanizing the
  youth vote.
• HeadCount fielded street teams in over 40 cities and sent volunteers on the road with 10 different concert tours.
• HeadCount registered 53,475 of its total voters at live music events.
• HeadCount worked directly with several colleges and fellow nonprofit organizations to register another 28,598 through co-branded activities. A New York City “Street and Subway Canvass Blitz” staged with partner New York Public Interest Research Group netted 10,161 registrations. An additional 15,546 registrations came from colleges and universities who teamed directly with HeadCount to stage voter registration drives on their campuses.
• The highest number of registrations was generated on the Dave Matthews Band tour – 8,420 in total. Dave Matthews Band’s website and email communication also generated an estimated 10,000 additional online registrations, by far the largest of any HeadCount artist or media partner.
• The artist that helped generate the largest number of registrations per concert was Jack Johnson, averaging 257 registrations at each of his solo concerts (even more at festivals).
• “Touring Teams” traveling with bands racked up over 18,000 new registrations, nearly 40 percent of the concert total.
• HeadCount got more than 50,000 concertgoers and music fans to “Pledge to Vote,” creating a massive database used for Get Out the Vote purposes.

"It’s not just the Presidency, stupid." This phrase carries as much importance today as its economic counterpart did 16 years ago.

In the thrilling environment of the national election, the nation is reveling in the wave of new voters. Yet at least two questions linger: (1) Can we leverage this involvement for big participation in state and local elections today?; and (2) Can we keep the historic energy from evaporating tomorrow morning? If we cannot meet these challenges, we will miss perhaps the largest civic opportunity of a generation.

We know that the electorate is excited this year, and that youth in particular are finding new entry points into the system—from colossal voter registration numbers to iPhone-app organizing phenomena. We’ve already seen encouraging signs: for instance, youth turn-out for the primary hit multiples of 2004 levels. Still, the central challenge of democracy is not whether a citizenry can make a few binary choices once every four years. The challenge of democracy is whether a populace of divergent interests can come together to accomplish common goals. How can we be sure that this organizing power and creativity can be funneled beyond a single (admittedly critical) race in 2008? How can we encourage the millions of new young voters to become life-long political participants?

We write not to add to the myth of youth ineffectiveness on the political process. We won't add to the chorus of "sure, they'll register … but will they vote?" with an equally curmudgeonly, "okay, they'll vote, but will they vote the whole ballot and stay involved after the election?" Without doubt, an engaged Millennial Generation will change the face of American politics for the better.

They were awakened by 9-11, by Katrina, by Iraq, and by the collapse of our economic house of cards. They will grapple with global warming, the redesign of governmental mechanisms, education policy for this century, foreign policy in an interconnected world, and the glories and excesses of global turbo-capitalism – and these are just the challenges we can predict.

We can meet these challenges if we funnel this energy into a new activist generation.

The opportunity in considering the whole ballot does not lie in winning or losing any particular races, although the impact would be undeniable. The true virtue of this project is the chance to build a culture of participation. An individual has a greater impact on a local race than national one. Indeed, a single person can be decisive on a local race, a race that have direct impact on an average young voter’s daily life. An example, to pick a state: the current Oregon Legislature voted to approve renewable energy standards, domestic partnerships, land use reform, a rainy day fund, substantial increases in school funding, and early voter registration for eligible 17-year-olds. Passing these bills was contingent on a one-seat majority in the State House. One of those seats is occupied by Jeff Barker, who won it by forty votes. Groups like the Oregon Bus Project sent hundreds of young people to walk in his district, each knocking on more doors than Barker’s margin of victory. The end result? Those young people got to go home and say, “Look Ma, I helped change history.”

And you can be sure many came back to participate again.

It’s time to begin building a lasting constituency for the public interest, and the best engagement we can have is at the local level. We are stronger together than we are apart, and to ever get public policy to yield to public interest, we’ll have to move not just to the left or to the right, but forward.

Jefferson Smith, Bus Project Executive Director
Garrett Downen, Bus Project Political Director