Mark Penn

Chock full of goodness, and featuring special appearances by everyone's favorite youth vote cranks.

• Over at WireTap, Sarah disspells 8 common myths about voter eligibility. Mandatory reading for students and first-time voters.
• Love to Twitter and worried about Republicans trying to steal the election? Put both to work on October 24th by joining the Vote Report Code Jam, where experts and activists like Allison Fine and Noel Hidalgo will team up with Rock the Vote, Mobilize.org, and activists across the country to create guidelines and procedures for using Twitter as an election protection tool in precincts across the country.
• The Project on Student Debt released their new national report on the issue. Check out this flash map for a state by state overview. I'll try to have a blog up about their full report before the end of the week.
• Students for Barack Obama have good news and valuable advice for students in Michigan trying to vote absentee.
• Mark Penn still cannot admit when he is wrong. Watch him minimize the impact and importance of the youth vote for Obama one more time.
• Finally, America's Best High School Newspaper notes that Obama is killing McCain in early voting. Skip the last paragraph quoting Curtis the Crank unless you're looking for your daily dose of "get of my lawn."

This is a guest post by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, the authors of Millennial Makeover. --Mike

As admirers of Curtis Gans' research on voter turnout, it pained us to read his Baby Boomer-oriented screed attacking the Millennial Generation, even denying the existence of the Millennials, for not acting exactly like the Boomers did when they were young. Aging Boomers like Tom Friedman have made the same public mistake, demonstrating just how convinced many leading thinkers among the Boomer Generation are that the political style of young people today is not like their own youthful political behavior was and is, therefore, not appropriate or useful. While it would be easy to address this error by simply commenting admiringly on Mike Connery’s excellent blog dissecting Gans' diatribe, the egregious nature of Gans' comments warrants a more fulsome response.

Since Gans' research report was focused on, in his words, the increased, “almost record,” turnout in this year’s presidential primaries, it is particularly surprising that he chose this vehicle to announce his distaste for the Millennial Generation and its political style. Gans cites the work of William Damon as the source of his knowledge about this generation, which is strange given the large number of more well-documented studies of the Millennial Generation disproving Damon’s contention that the parents of Millennials are “creating a generation of young people who lack confidence and direction.” The evidence shows just the opposite. If anything, employers and teachers who interact daily with Millennials complain that they are almost too confident, to the point of sounding “cheeky.”

This generation's self-confidence and orientation toward the group and the broader society has important political implications. Recent polling data from USAToday/CNN demonstrate that Millennials are paying close attention to the 2008 election and have every intention of voting, at numbers rivaling those of older voters. Their survey of more than 900 young Americans, taken Sept. 18-28 found that:

• 75 % of Millennials are registered to vote
• 73% plan to vote
• 64% have given "quite a lot" of thought to the election

Even Gans concedes that Millennials may vote in large numbers in this election. But he says that they will do so only because of their fondness for Senator Barack Obama and not because of any long-term commitment to the political process. Millennials he says

“were brought in by the uniqueness of Obama’s candidacy—precisely because he seemed to offer something different than the politics they had been eschewing.” He continues, “they won’t stay in if he’s not elected and their interest and engagement won’t be sustained if he does not live up to the promise of his candidacy once in office.”

Gans makes this assertion in spite of having no data to support it.

There is no doubt that Millennials have responded very positively to Senator Obama and his candidacy and that the Obama campaign has strongly targeted this generation. Millennials supported Obama overwhelmingly in this year's Democratic primaries and virtually all current general election surveys indicate that Millennials favor him over John McCain by at least a 2:1 margin.

But the political attitudes and identifications of Millennials were clearly evident long before the Obama candidacy gained widespread visibility. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2007 indicated that Millennials identified as Democrats over Republicans by nearly a 2:1 ratio (52% vs. 30%). And, a study conducted at about the same time by the Millennial Strategy Program of communication research and consultation firm Frank N. Magid Associates showed that Millennials were the first generation since at least the GI Generation to contain a greater number of self-perceived liberals than conservatives. All of this at least raises the possibility that the high level of Millennial political involvement is significantly based on the Democratic and liberal affinities of the generation and would be strong even without Obama's strong candidacy.

Gans makes it clear why he is sure that the political involvement of Millennials stems solely from their attachment to Barack Obama. He yearns for the “idealistic activism” of the 1950s and 1960s when, according to Gans, all of America shared a “different ethos” thanks to an educational system based “on John Dewey’s philosophy.” Since, in Gans' mind, the emerging Millennial Generation doesn’t share the liberal idealism of his own youth, it cannot possibly sustain its current level of political activity. If only it were so, Curtis.

In fact, the ideological ferment of the late 1960s, led by half of the Baby Boomer Generation’s counter-cultural rebellion against authority, and the reaction against this social turmoil by the other half of Boomer Generation, produced the political gridlock that caused the very cynicism in the older portions of the electorate that Gans decries. Even his own expert on the Millennial Generation, William Damon, concedes that Millennials “are working hard, doing well enough in school, and staying out of trouble.” Indeed, America is enjoying far lower levels of socially deviant behavior, such as teen age pregnancy and crime, since these indicators began to soar during the adolescent years the Baby Boomer Generation with its disdain for social rules and convention.

But Gans' own words demonstrate the flaw in his thinking. The 1950s that he writes about so nostalgically was actually an era dominated by the behavior and ethos of the GI Generation, another “civic” generational archetype, just like Millennials, not by his beloved Boomers. That generation put FDR in the White House, brought about the New Deal approach to progressive government, defeated fascism in WWII, and voted at rates greater than those of previous generations. Their Democratic loyalty lasted a lifetime: the last remaining members of the GI Generation and the first sliver of Millennials provided the only pluralities for John Kerry over George W. Bush among any of the generational cohorts voting in 2004.

The previous falloff in voting by young people described by Gans in his diatribe is completely explained by the generational attitudes and behaviors of Boomers and Gen-Xers as they moved into and out of young adulthood. One generation, Boomers, initially turned out to vote spurred by admirable idealism and then often left the political process when they discovered in Gans’ telling phrase, that “their leaders showed feet of clay.” The other, Generation X, never bothered to participate in large numbers having been discouraged by the political gridlock Boomers had created. Now that Millennials make up the entire population of voters 26 and under in this election, you can be assured that they will not only vote at rates comparable to older voters, just like their GI Generation great-grandparents did, but they will also continue to vote heavily and participate vigorously in the nation’s political process for the rest of their lives.

They will do so, because unlike Curtis Gans and his ilk, who never were able to translate their idealism into action, Millennials are intent on working together to create a better America than the one Boomers have left them as an inheritance. Their confidence, political activism, and unity will begin to initiate that change on Election Day this year thanks to a record turnout of young voters. The 1.7 million vote plurality given to John Kerry by young voters in 2004 will grow to between 8 and 10 million for Barack Obama when this involved and unified generation goes to the polls on November 4. Only Curtis Gans and out of touch Boomers will be surprised.

Gargh! I had a rebuttal to Mark Penn's Op-Ed in The Politico last week all set to go and then I closed out the tab on it. You'll have to take my word that it was brilliant and thoughtful and eloquent. Now you'll have to settle for the short and clunky version.

Penn's Thesis: Old people (aka "Active Grannies") are making up a larger and larger portion of the electorate (as lifespans are elongated and the Boomers start to retire) and they are voting less reliably Democratic. The candidates both need to work on courting older voters.

Problems with said thesis:

1. Penn never really proves his point about "Active Grannies," which he at first defines as "empty nesters, " but often expands to anyone over 65 or anyone over 45 to prove his point. You can't label half the electorate a microtrend. This essay is a big mushy fruit salad of comparisons between apples, oranges and pineapples.
2. This is already a failed strategy. Penn tried this strategy while at the helm of the Clinton primary campaign. It lost out to a wave of young voters, who Penn himself derided as "looking like Facebook." Well those Facebook voters made the difference for Obama over Clinton's "active grannies" and even rivaled the 65+ demographic in Iowa - the straw that broke this strategy's back.
3. Does Penn really think that the campaigns won't reach out to older voters? Every campaign since the beginning of time has ignored youth and focused on the senior vote. The idea that the campaigns would ignore senior voters is ridiculous on its face.

The most important thing to note here is that this is a highly reactive, defensive Op-Ed. Penn is responding to what he sees as threatening changes in the partisan habits of older age demographics. This change was entirely foreseeable. As the Greatest and Silent Generations - traditionally more progressive - age out, and the heavily divided Boomers age into their senior years, we would expect to see the senior vote divide more between the parties, especially in close elections.

What he neglects is that we need to change that dynamic. We shouldn't only react to what is happening in the older segments of the electorate, we should work to lay the groundwork for future changes. Time and resources invested now in making young voters life long progressives will continue to pay dividends decades into the future. When the Millennials start to retire, the "reliable senior" demographic will become progressive along with them as they replace the more conservative Gen X.

This is what Penn is missing. That in order to stop playing defense at the older end of the spectrum, we need to invest in offense courting younger people at the lower end of the age spectrum. The campaigns will court older voters with door knocks, TV ads, mailers, robo-calls and more. They don't need any extra encouragement on that front. It's young people - that investment in the future often forsaken by consultants like Penn - that needs far more attention from our political class. The best defense is a good offense.