Open Left

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.

Chris Bowers wrote a post last night at Open Left explaining why the Republicans are facing such a gloom and doom scenario with young voters. In "Getting Older Doesn't Make You Less Black or Less Gay," Bowers argues that whether or not one gets more conservative as he/she ages is irrelevant. As the minority groups making up a significant amount of the Millennial generation continue toward majority-minority status, their affinity for the Democratic Party and simultaneous rejection of the GOP will prove to be firm and fixed.

...Now young voters are breaking toward Democrats at record levels not just because they are young, but because they are non-white, non-Christian, and out of the closet.

This is significant, because while you might trade in your heart for your head when you get older, you don't get more white, more Christian, or less gay with age. As such, Republicans are not going to start winning these voters over until they start performing better among non-Christians, non-whites, and the LGBT community...

While I agree with Bowers' final conclusion, I feel compelled to fuss with one piece of the premise. Bowers gives a bit too much credence to the "with age comes conservatism" bit. In Rock the Vote's "Partisanship: A Lifelong Loyalty that Develops Early," released in February 2007, we learn that the only thing remarkable about aging and political preferences is the stability in partisan identification over time.

In 1964, the seminal work on this issue, The American Voter, echoes this point: the authors note that "…persons who identify with one of the parties typically have held the same partisan tie for all or almost all of their adult lives."

"When we ask people to recall their first presidential vote, for example, we discover that of those who can remember their vote for President two-thirds still identify with the same party they first voted for."

"A majority (56 per cent) of these presidential voters have never crossed party lines."

Additional studies published in the 1990s bolster the finding that partisan identification is a remarkably stable factor over a voters’ life.

Partisan identification is, of course, not immovable; various factors, including candidate quality, major events (i.e. Watergate),and social factors (i.e. job loss, marriage) can move a voter to one party or another.

However, as noted in The American Voter, "[Partisanship is] a picture characterized more by stability than by change—not by a rigid, immutable fixation on one party rather than the other, but by a persistent adherence and a resistance to contrary influence."

The disaffection between youth and the Republican Party is extensively chronicled on this site and elsewhere throughout the blogosphere. The values which today's youth deem critical -- pragmatism, diversity, and cooperation among them -- barely make an appearance in the operations and politics of today's Republican Party. So Bowers' post noting the progressive views of the ever-growing minority populations is just one more layer in the turbulent relationship.

Perhaps the most frightening graphic for the GOP referenced in Bowers' post came from another post by Alan Abramowitz, at Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball. Of those 18-29 year olds voting in 2008, over 50 percent identified with the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

Should the GOP continue to rely on its white, conservative base for electoral success, failing to grow any youth movement within the party, the numbers can only get worse. Of course I'm just a concern troll, so what do I know?

Bowers' post, combined with the lessons learned from the Rock the Vote paper, is just one more sign of a seismic shift in store for American politics.

I'm finally starting to feel better and catching up on things today. Here's some must-read stories from the last week of 2008:

• Jose Antonio Vargas writes that politics is no longer local, it's viral, in his latest piece making the rounds among the technorati. He hits the nail on the head when he writes:

  Looking back, I realize that it was on that Thursday night that a new political reality was cemented in my head. In the past, we've thought of politics as something over there -- isolated, separate from our daily lives, as if on a stage upon which journalists, consultants, pollsters and candidates spun and dictated and acted out the process. Now, because of technology in general and the Internet in particular, politics has become something tangible. Politics is right here. You touch it; it's in your laptop and on your cellphone. You control it, by forwarding an e-mail about a candidate, donating money or creating a group. Politics is personal. Politics is viral. Politics is individual.

  And we're just getting started.

• Also in the Post, Eli Pariser of MoveOn writes that both MoveOn and Obama are tapping into the same thing - people power and the voices of ordinary Americans.
• Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers has an excellent plan to help activists to take advantage of the first Democratic President and friendly congress in over a decade. This is something all youth organizations should be following, and contributing to.
• According to PEW, when it comes to where American's get their news, the Internet has surpassed all mediums except television.
• Want to work for the new administration? Filling out a form on Change.gov is only the first step. The Politico has a rundown on the sophisticated strategies that advocacy organizations and interest groups are using to influence the hiring process.
• Finally, The New York Times notes that as teen unemployment skyrockets, so is teen violence. The paper calls on the Obama administration to address the problem.

I'm catching up on my reading this week and just caught this post by Matt Stoller of Open Left in which he praises the emerging progressive leadership pipeline.

Good Progressive Movement Happenings:

Today, I learned that Ezra Temko was just elected to the Newark City Council in Delaware. Temko's slogan was 'Economic Progress, Environmental Sustainability, Responsive Representation'. He ran a grassroots campaign and knocked on every door in Newark. He also graduated from college in 2006, and comes out of the Young People for the American Way training program. He is now entering the Young Elected Officials Network, another People for the American Way program.

It takes a long time to develop and nurture talent, to learn how to run campaigns and to build support networks to make sure that progressive policies follow the election of progressives. You can just look at the collapse of congestion pricing in New York City to see how electing Democrats, even progressive ones, and keeping them unconnected to larger networks will prevent us from reaching our goals. Conversely, looking at FISA or net neutrality shows us that the networks we are building become much stronger than their individual parts.

Young People for the American Way and the Young Elected Officials Network deserve a congratulations today. They set their sites four years ago on building the next generation of leaders, and they are here, running organizations, and getting elected. And three other fellows from Young People for America have announced their candidacies for local elections, including a native American in South Dakota.

Building diverse leadership is going to take decades, but the payoff is going to be a kinder, saner, and gentler world. It's what we've all been working towards. If you date the founding of our movement in 1998, with the creation of Moveon, and you look at the creation of organizations like YP4 and YEO just four years ago, you can see that it's really happening. People like Ezra Temko, Daniel Biss, and Darcy Burner are already showing remarkable levels of leadership, and showing all of us that our work, our effort, our energy, our invested money, is showing signs of real impact.

Matt is right that sometimes it is hard to see the consequences of our actions. What we're doing is building power and talent gradually, year by year. But as hard as it is to see at times, it is happening thanks to YP4, YEO, and many many more organizations. We should take the time to highlight these successes as much as possible.

The Young Elected Officials Network has over a hundred candidates in its network. YP4 has hundreds of fellows that are currently enrolled or graduates of its program. GOTV focused groups have turned out young voters in ever increasing numbers for two straight elections. The League and it's partner group Opportunity Maine passed major legislation boosting college affordability and student debt relief for young people in their state.

What other success stories are out there that haven't received their due attention?

In discussing a new fellowship offered by the Open Society Institute, Josh Bolotsky of Living Liberally has written a vital post on Open Left about the emerging progressive leadership training pipeline. Read it.

Here's an excerpt:

Like so much of the frenzied progressive infrastructure-building of the last few years, much of the netroots support for these types of activist-in-training programs comes from the often correct perception that given the huge amount of ground left to cover in catching up to what the institutional right has done, we better get cracking on "the progressive version of" whatever given aspect of conservative advantage we seek to emulate - if we can just start with our own progressive version, in other words, we'll be on the right track. As someone who spent time as the Chair of a major College Democrats state federation, I can anecdotally attest to the kind of forced comparison points you often hear from frustrated students - that Campus Progress is or should be "the progressive version of" Young Americans for Freedom, or the Center for Progressive Leadership is or should be "the progressive version of" the Leadership Institute, and so on. In other words, we're so frustrated at how far behind we are in the race that we're looking for the reflexive response, which is a counterpart above all else - just as we might look at, say, Air America Radio to be "the progressive version of" right-wing talk radio.

All of which is not just well and good, but, I think, quite necessary - it's wonderful that we are moving towards having these counterparts. But as a first step - then you start moving towards innovations. All of which makes the choice of OSI to make eligibility open to all, student or no, all the more striking: along with projects like YP4's Young Elected Officials Network, it's a unique take on the format, one that isn't a reaction to any kind of adult-training-program that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is cooking up.

The emergence of this new leadership training pipeline - particularly Young People For, DMI Scholars, and the Center for Progressive Leadership is something that I cover in my book as part of the "[dot] Org Boom," and as I've been touring I frequently get a question similar to the one Josh is asking - is it enough to replicate what the Right has done, or do we need to innovate?

Josh is right that imitation is not enough and we need to innovate and create better training programs more suited to the values of the progressive movement - at home and internationally. He's also right that in some ways we're starting to move beyond that "first step" in building a leadership pipeline.

But I would add that in another, more basic way we are still on "step one," as Josh terms it. I'm speaking in terms of scale and resources. Organizations like YAF still receive far more monetary support from the conservative foundation world and donor class, and these organizations still have a much greater scope in terms of how many conservatives they train each year. In 2003, the last year for which I have data (data which comes, btw, from Young People For, which completed a study of the conservative Leadership Pipeline), Young America's Foundation had a $12million budget. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Leadership Foundation each had $11 and $9 million, respectively. All three of these organizations had at least $1.5 million in reserve. That's money not earmarked for any program, but rather a mini-endowment to ensure the fiscal health of the organization should they suffer a decrease in funding.

Comparatively, the organizations cited by Josh, and covered in my book, have budgets that are less than 1/10th the annual budget of their conservative "counterparts." In some ways, we are moving beyond "step one" - mimicking the conservative infrastructure - but in others we do still lag frustratingly behind. One of those areas is in the level of commitment we're seeing from progressive foundations and individual donors.

This is actually a problem larger than the emerging progressive leadership pipeline. Almost all of the new youth organizations created in the last 5 years have faced serious funding crises since the initial boom. Many of them spent 2005 and 2007 (non-election years) operating on shoe-string budgets and almost none of them are operating at full scale.

There are a couple of reasons for this, some of which are reasonable and some of which are extremely troublesome. The first reason - and an understandable one - is that donors have spent the last few years demanding a much higher measure of accountability, or Return on Investment (ROI) for their donations. Youth organizations have had to work to prove that what they do is effective with hard metrics and independent research studies. A related issue is that no one knows how effective it is to just dump money at "the youth movement." For every project that worked out well in 2004, there was another that bombed or had little to show for its efforts. And many organizations that received significant funding boosts did not spend that money as efficiently as possible. Some donors are indeed waiting to see what the balance is between their donations and effective/efficient movement to a higher scale of organizing.

The second reason, which is less acceptable, is that the progressive youth movement is still highly dependent on just a few donors who provide the millions of dollars that have made our current gains among young voters possible. To them, I and other youth organizers are extremely grateful. But it's unfortunate that the club of donors is so small. The growing progressive youth infrastructure needs more supporters beyond the few that helped us get this far. More progressives - young people included - need to be supporting the work of these groups.

This is a concurrent process - innovation and scale shouldn't occur separately. But once this happens - once progressive youth groups have a donor base on par with their conservative counterparts - that's when I think we'll truly be out of "step one."

Two of my favorite bloggers/activists--Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, both formerly of MyDD--have officially launched their new community blog--Open Left--along with Mike Lux, whom I've never heard of before. Matt Stoller explains the name:

Why Open Left? Why not just netroots?

Good question. We've never been comfortable with the term 'netroots'. It's a term without a coherent meaning, sometimes pointing to liberals that organize in online communities, sometimes meaning anyone online who does so. This term doesn't describe who we are, because there is no divide between online and offline at this point; insiders use email and blogs, and outsider activists run campaigns and have in-person conferences. The term 'Open Left' is a much wider and more descriptive way of understanding the larger political dynamics at play. It is not the use of the internet that matters, it is the expression of traditional left-wing American principles on open systems that is the institutional innovation at work here.

This has been a long time coming. The internet itself expresses certain values that go back to very early American philosophers, and its communal and networked structure combined with its rampant capacity for individualism is uniquely situated for our moment in history. The third important left wing movement in modern American history is nearly ten years old, it's time we recognize what's going on.

Thus, OpenLeft.com.

I'll be very interested to see how this effects MyDD and its readership. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years, and espescially since Mike and Co. left Music for America, is that we have to look at staffing of progressive institutions that are a part of, or provide services to, the movement in a new way. This movement has arisen partly because of the political climate, and partly because of the rise of networked technology. And since the network is really a mixture of connections between people and through technologies, the network (or movement) might "abandon" an organization or site when the person (in network terms, the connecting node) who was connecting that org or site to the broader movement leaves. In this case I believe that Jerome Armstrong and MyDD are entrenched enough within the movement that this may not have much effect at all on MyDD's readership. I guess we'll see.

Update: Well it didn't take long for things to get a bit testy. Check out Jerome's response to Open Left forgetting to put MyDD on its blogroll. Jerome is also tiring of all of this "movement" talk and doesn't seem too happy with the choice of Clintonite Lux. Hmm... This could get interesting...