College Democrats of America

Recently I've mentioned a number of vote protection projects in passing. As we get closer to election day, and continue to hear about misleading information, long wait lines at polls, and other instances of voter suppression/discouragement, I wanted to give one of them a bigger shout-out.

Today, the Twitter Vote Report website officially launched. This is a really interesting project that is attempting to use technology and crowdsourcing to highlight and resolve common election-day problems. Here's the description from their presser:

A volunteer network of software developers, designers, and other collaborators have teamed up with the award-winning blog techPresident to launch Twitter Vote Report. Individual voters will use their cell phones to report on their individual experiences – the good, bad and ugly. How long is the wait in Cleveland, Ohio? Are the new optical scan machines staying up and running in Palm Beach County,Florida? Is failure to bring ID to the polls thwarting first-time voters in Indianapolis? With Twitter Vote Report, we’ll know the answers to those questions straight from voters from all over the country.

If you are familiar with Twitter, here are step by step instructions on how to report problems at your polling place (If you are a novice, here's a primer):

It’s simple. We voters are using Twitter and other texting tools to report on how the vote is really going during this election, and we’re urging everyone to use the common word (or “hashtag” in Twitter lingo) of #votereport as they do so. If that happens, we’ll all be able watch on maps and graphs how the election is going across the country.

Including “#votereport” in your tweet is enough to get your report tracked by Twitter Vote Report. But the more details you can stuff in, the better. So, for example, include in your Twitter post:

• #[zip code] to indicate where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″
• #machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
• #early if you’re voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

That last part is significant. If someone is erroneously telling you that you are not allowed to vote, or is preventing others from voting, there is no guarantee that just sending a Tweet solve that problem. Texting the election protection coalition, or calling their toll free number (866-OUR-VOTE) is still a necessary step.

What will happen when you Tweet (theoretically), is that local journalists and activists will become aware of the situation on the ground. That can create grassroots and media pressure to correct the situation, or in a worst case scenario, influence the post-election story and help institute reforms before future elections.

#votereport reports will, in real-time, be made available to anyone who wants them. Visit TwitterVoteReport.com to see the reports flow in. Voters can read these messages and help one another solve problems, liking letting someone know when a polling place has been moved. Advocacy groups can use them to spot problems. Citizens can figure out how to lend fellow voters a hand. And the press can zero in on local voting stories worth telling. Just sending in short reports can help your fellow citizens to vote.

Right now, the Election Protection Coalition, Rock the Vote, Credo Mobile, and Common Cause are working with Twitter Vote Report, but any organization, blogger, or reporter can follow the feeds to find out what is happening in their area. This should be interesting project to follow on E-Day.

Update: A correction has been issued for this piece. Two young people did address the convention on Monday and Tuesday. Read the full correction here.
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My final write-up on the DNC.

On Thursday, Senator Obama finished the long primary process and accepted his party’s nomination in front of 75,000 supporters. In no small part, Senator Obama stood on the podium at Invesco field thanks to the hard work, and votes, of millions of young voters, many of who cast their first ballot in support of his campaign.

Turnout among young voters in the Democratic primary was double the level recorded in 2004, and young voters broke heavily in favor of Senator Obama. In the Iowa caucuses, young voters performed on par with the "reliable" senior vote, and were widely credited with providing Senator Obama’s margin of victory.

That trend continued at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, in which young people played a larger-than-usual, though still not proportional, part in the proceedings. Young people made up a record 16% of all official participants in Denver, including 631 delegates. This represented a huge increase over 2000 and 2004, when young people made up 9 and 11% of convention participants, respectively.

As Crystal Strait, political director of the California Democratic Party and active Young Democrat noted during a press conference by the DNC Youth Council, young people were still not represented in the convention at the levels in which they participate in Democratic politics. Young people made up 19% of the Democratic electorate in 20004, and under the DNC Charter, should also make up 19% of the delegates at the Democratic Convention, 3% higher than the record levels found in Denver.

Off the convention floor, though, young faces could be found in abundance. The College Democrats of America held their own national convention in Denver, concurrent with the DNC. The group flooded the city with hundreds of student activists who came for trainings, speeches from top DNC officials, and perhaps a chance to view Senator Obama’s acceptance speech live.

During the day, panels coordinated by the DNC Youth Council – a board consisting of leaders from College Democrats, Young Democrats, Democrats Work, and Future Majority (myself and coblogger Kevin Bondelli are both members), as well as all members of the DNC under age 36 – provided access to elected officials and party leaders like Howard Dean and Scott Kleeb, as well as advice on best practices for organizing young voters or running for office.

Non-partisan youth organizations, such as the Bus Federation and Rock the Vote, were also in attendance, throwing parties at night and flooding the street with viral campaigns during the day. It was hard to walk down the street without noticing Bus Federation volunteers dressed as vampires, angels, or devils to raise awareness about Trick or Vote, their national Halloween GOTV canvass. Often not more than a few yards away, Rock the Vote street team members handed out cryptic black postcards with white numbering. The numbers changed each day, and represented important statistics on young voters.

Despite this unprecedented youth involvement at the convention, young people were more likely to be seen than heard by the delegates and party officials in Denver.

Though they are the official youth arm of the Democratic Party, the College Democrats were unable to provide the vast majority of their membership in Denver access to the first three nights of the convention. The Young Democrats and DNC Youth Council had similar problems obtaining credentials for their members early in the week, and young Democratic organizers in Denver needed to rely on their state parties or personal connections to obtain credentials to the Pepsi Center. The situation was much improved for Thursday night's events at Invesco Field, for which party youth organizations were mostly able to provide access to their members.

Most surprisingly, the one place young voters were completely absent at the Democratic National Convention was at the podium. During my four nights at the convention I did not see one young voter or youth organizer – from CDA, YDA, SFBO or otherwise – address the convention. Young Democrats looking forward to Chelsea Clinton’s introduction of her mother as a kind of passing-the-torch to the next generation moment were disappointed when the former First Daughter’s role was reduced to narrating a video about her mother’s life.

Thursday at Invesco Field was no better. Not one young person took the stage that night – not even during a brief period in which the party introduced half a dozen “regular folks” to talk about the problems they face. It was a curious and conspicuous omission considering the economic plight of “Generation Debt.”

The closest the Party came to including young people during the night’s proceedings came during the speeches of Al Gore and Sen. Obama, both of whom acknowledged the unique role of young people in pushing for change during this election.

To the extent that this is a change election, it is also generational election. Age was the greatest predictor of how someone would cast a vote in the primary process. Unfortunately, the convention organizers chose to talk at young people this week rather reward them for their activism with a place at the podium. Young voters are pushing the Democratic Party towards victory, yet it appears that the convention organizers still adhere to the old adage: children should be seen, but not heard.

The two superdelegates from the College Democrats of America - Lauren Wolfe and Awais Khaleel - have endorsed Obama. This comes at the end of a long process in which they posted a YouTube video asking for advice from college students, were lobbied heavily by Obama surrogates, their fellow young superdelegates, and Students for Barack Obama. It also comes on the heels of criticism for lagging in their endorsement.

There are 5 superdelegates allocated in total to YDA and CDA. Lauren and Awais's endorsements put the tally at 3 - 1 in favor of Obama. Still to endorse: YDA President David Hardt.

Lauren Wolfe, the President of the College Democrats, and Awais Khaleel, CDA's Vice President, are two of the youngest Super Delegates who will decide this nomination. They're asking for your advice on how to cast their ballots:

It's unscientific, and I tend to think that the voting preferences shown by young people at the polls will give them a better indication as to how their constituents would prefer they cast their "super ballots," but this is an attempt at bringing transparency to the process that should be commended.

More cynical people might also say that it's not a bad way to list-build for the College Democrats.

When writing and researching Youth to Power, I knew that many in the College Democrats (current and alumni), would not like what I wrote. My book comes down pretty hard on College Democrats. It shouldn't come as a surprise, I've written similarly disapproving posts here on FM in the past. It seems the backlash has started.

I'm sure there are many excellent leaders in the College Democrats, and many individual chapters that excel. Nevertheless, as a whole the organization lags behind YDA and it's newer counterparts in many areas and I believe what I wrote to be accurate. Here's my response to a review published in the Politico by Ethan Porter, a former Executive Board member of the College Democrats.

In a review published by The Politico, Ethan Porter fails to offer a substantive critique of my book, Youth to Power, preferring to brush aside a majority of my observations and conclusions so he can settle scores for his own organization, the College Democrats, who come off rather poorly in its pages. His analysis is laughably lopsided.

In my book, I note that a boom in youth organizing - funded by disaffected donors, run by Millennials, and mostly occurring outside of the party structure (though also within through the Young Democrats) - adopted new tactics and strategies to reach young voters. These strategies included culturally appropriate, peer to peer outreach that treated young people as a valuable constituency of voters and engaged citizens, not as manual labor for campaigns or apathetic slackers. Over the course of the last 5 years, these new organizations have built a progressive youth movement from scratch that in differing ways lags behind, rivals and in others surpasses the conservative youth infrastructure.

Unfortunately, you wouldn't know any of this from reading Porter's review. To be sure, Porter feigns interest in the subject, noting the meteoric rise of Obama and expressing curiosity as to how it happened:

How and why did this happen? Who were the major players, and which organizations were most responsible?

These are important questions that deserve thoughtful answers. Unfortunately, Mike Connery’s “Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority,” fails to provide them.

Apparently 76 pages devoted exclusively to outlining those organizations, what they do, how they got started, who runs them, what they've accomplished, and where they still need to improve doesn't qualify in Porter's world. After briefly noting that I "get the big picture right," Porter ignores the bulk of the reporting in my book and, offering little in the way of evidence, states that my "provocative" thesis - outlined above - "misconstrues the nature of the recent upsurge in youth liberal activism."

Exactly what the true nature of the recent upsurge in liberal activism is, Porter never really says. In reading his review one is left with the feeling that it's got a whole lot more to do with Porter's own organization, the College Democrats. Unfortunately, neither he nor the College Democrats of America, with whom I spoke with during the writing of my book, can provide any proof that this is the case. What few examples Porter does hold up merely reinforce the points I make in my text.

Porter champions "small d democracy" and trumpets the College Democrats and the DNC as a shining example of "chaotic," decentralized activism. But decentralized doesn't mean unaccountable, and that's the real problem. It's fine if the College Democrats have a decentralized, nimble structure, as long as they accomplish real results which can be proven and replicated. Decentralize doesn't mean disconnected and mechanisms should be in place to report on activities and share best (and worst) practices. None of that data could be provided to me by the College Democrats.

Absent such controls, it is difficult to say just what the College Democrats do, which is one of the major problems with the organization during the time period on which I reported. There is little difference between the programming, structure and strategy of the College Democrats between 2004 and 2000, yet the results of the elections (in terms of youth participation) couldn't be more different. At the very best, that speaks well of Millennials, but is says very little about the College Democrats.

No, the real difference came not from the College Democrats, but from the new organizations that I discussed at length, and the cultural and peer-to-peer strategies they brought to the table. This was admirably documented by researcher Ryan Friedrichs in his study - Young Voter Mobilization in 2004 (pdf) and further explained in the report A Gift to Democrats (pdf) put out by Skyline Public Works.

Porter's final complaint seems to be that I failed to mention some of the stellar talent produced by the College Democrats. I have no doubt that CDA does produce some talent that do excellent work and go on to illustrious careers in Democratic politics. Just as I have no doubt that certain chapters of CDA are also very effective at what they do even if the organization as a whole is not. However both of these points completely miss what is important about the last few years and my arguments against the College Democrats.

At numerous points in the last few years, the College Democrats were afforded the opportunity to increase their budget by an order of magnitude. Time and again, they were offered the opportunity to run peer to peer field programs of the kind that YDA and the organizations of the [dot] Org Boom embraced. It is this infusion of money and investment in youth as a constituency to be organized that are making the difference, and in both of these areas the College Democrats are not a significant part of the picture. Maybe this will change in 2008, but it was not true during the writing of my book and in the time period on which I reported.

As for the connection between progressive youth organizing and the rise of Barack Obama, I freely admit that my book touches on this only briefly and offers little in the way of direct connections. Not because there aren't any, but because the final pages were written well before Sen. Obama's victory in Iowa at a time when Clinton actually led Sen. Obama in most youth polling. Alas, I was not able to see into the future while writing and researching my book.

But I continue to blog about this topic on Future Majority, and I've made note numerous times that Sen. Obama's campaign is a beneficiary of the strategies tested and pioneered in 2004 and 2006, as well as a pioneer themselves. Without question, his youth campaign, which is quite tight-lipped about their tactical operations, has expanded on these successes in ways that many of us could not even dream in 2004, but that was outside the scope of my book by virtue of the fact that when I was writing the book Obama's successes had not yet happened.

In the end, Porter's discontent with my book is understandable as I criticized an organization of which he was a part. Yet that bias clearly clouded his judgment in his review, and his critique offers little to disprove my claims or uphold his own.

Cross-posted at MyDD

The College Democrats of America recently entered the YouTube Revolution with the launch of their own channel and four videos. It's a good attempt to offer more information and engagement to their members, and I'm excited by the prospects. However, I think they are falling short of reaching the full potential of this medium.

These videos offer the perfect chance for the College Democrats to shine a light on the inner workings of what seems to be a fairly opaque and infamously cliqueish organization. Just as importantly, they represent an opportunity for CDA chapters to reach out beyond the political science and pre-law departments, and embrace a wider section of their campus peers. Can you imagine a more perfect medium with which to involve media studies, film studies, theater and art students in the activities of CDA?

Here's some quick and friendly advice to the College Democrats as they experiment with online video: