the league

I’m heading off the grid for the next week to take a much needed vacation. In my absence, I’ve arranged for a number of guest bloggers to join us from some really great progressive organizations including Living Liberally, the Bus Federation, the Young Elected Officials Network, Democrats Work, The League, Swing Semester, the Young Democrats and more. Along with Kevin and Alice, who will continue their regular blogging, these great guests willll take care of you through the holiday. Treat them well and leave lots of comments. I’ll be back July 7th.

Also, don’t forget that user diaries/blogs are now enabled. You could always throw your own .02 into the discussion and write a blog. Just login (or create an account) and click “Create Content” in the personal navigation menu at the top of the page. Some folks like the Sahar Massachi from the Roosevelt Institution and George Colli, who is running for CT state senate, have already done so and found themselves on the front page. Kevin and Alice will have their eyes out for good user-generated content to promote while I’m on break.

While you are waiting for the PA results to come in, check out these stories around the internets:

• The DNC has an excellent primer on all things related to the Democratic Convention: Delegates, Super Delegates, and more.
• The New York Times notes that age is the biggest predictor of support (aside from race) in the Democratic primary, a trend I'm sure we'll see play out later tonight.
• MySpace has teamed up with NBC news to produce a snazzy new political section to their website: Decision '08. This is very similar to the partnership ABC forged with FaceBook. For MySpace's sake, I hope it's more effective. And if anyone is reading, or goodness sake, please stop the video from auto-playing. The last thing I want is Chris Matthews blaring at me whenever I hit your site.
• U.S. cell phone voters would like to be able to vote via text.
• Bush's approval ratings are the lowest of any President in the last 70 years. Maybe that's why he decided it was a good idea to appear on Deal or No Deal last night.
• The Nation has launched their annual student writing contest.
• CNN's League of First Time Voters, which you may be hearing about tonight, is catching flack from youth activists.
• Finally, students in Washington and Arizona are competing to see who can register more new voters on Facebook:

It seems like every time I get on an airplane, a zillion things happen that I should be covering on the blog. Last week I got on a plane and Elliot Spitzer was my governor. When I got off . . . not so much.

Today, these things happened, all of which deserve more attention than I've got time to give at the moment:

First, The League has hired a new Executive Director, Rob 'Biko' Baker, to replace Billy (Wimsatt), who has run the org since its creation. If you've been involved with The League before, you already know Biko. For those who don't, watch this:

Second, on Thursday at 6pm MTV will host a conversation between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and eight young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. MTV's debates/forums have been really good this year. Not a boxer, brief, Mac or PC in sight. This should be worth watching.

Finally, the DNC Youth Council continues to work for you (disclosure, I'm on the council). This time our co-chairs Jason Rae and Jane Flemming have put together a letter going out to every state party requesting that at least one PLEO Delegate (Party Leader/Elected Official) to the Democratic Convention be a young leader. The letter is cosigned by Mark Brewer, President of the Association of State Democratic Chairs.

This is awesome for a number of reasons, not least of which is that every state party in the country is going to get a letter showing them how great the youth vote is for the party. State parties still need a kick in the ass when it comes to dedicating resources to organize young voters. This is a small step in the right direction - especially if they follow through.

If you want to represent young voters at the convention, call up the state party and ask about a youth PLEO position. And do mention the Youth Council.

(Sample letter attached as pdf)

The League of Young Voters, one of the most inclusive, kick-ass youth organizations around is competing in a Facebook Giving Challenge for $50,000. But they need to rack up more "unique donors" than their competing organizations. It doesn't matter how much they raise, what matters is how big their donor base is.

If you donate to their cause today, they have a chance of winning $1,000 for their organization. If you donate between now and February 1st, they have a chance at winning $50,000 - which would be a huge boost and help them launch more programs, hire more staff, etc. for 2008.

I just gave $10. If you can, go throw a little bit of cash their way. It's a great cause, and even if they don't win it's money well-spent.

If it doesn't seem fair to you that a measly 6% of Iowans get an over-sized say in picking our next nominees, The League of Young Voters and MoveOn have a solution to your pre-caucus envy. Today the two groups teamed up to launch their own primary on Facebook. Via a new application that they hope will highlight the beliefs of young voters and showcase their interests in the primary process.

The League Primary is a new third party application on facebook that allows users to select their choice for President (in either party), highlight their 3 most important issues, and cast their ballot among their numerous Facebook networks. Votes are tallied nationally, and for each network to which a member belongs (for instance, I belong to the New York network, so I can view results nationally or within New York). Students will be able to view results for their school networks and so on, creating innumerable " virtual primaries" limited only by the total number of networks on Facebook.

Because The League and MoveOn are working to spotlight the influence and engagement of young voters, participation is limited to those 35 years of age or younger, and voting will end on February 5th, the so-called Super Tuesday when a majority of states will be going to the polls. For Facebook users who may not be sure where their loyalties lie, MoveOn and the League have partnered with Glassbooth, a non-partisan web effort that matches users with a presidential candidate based on their issue preferences. To ensure the integrity of the vote, users can only cast one ballot, though they may change their vote at anytime up until February 5th.

The effort is ostensibly non-partisan, though many of the supporting groups - including Rock the Vote, Living Liberally, SAVE, Young Voter PAC, WireTap, The Bus Project, Center for Community Change, and others - have a progressive bent or are non-partisan in name only. Through these partnerships, The League and MoveOn hope to hit at least 500,000 Facebook users today through partner lists alone. After that, they're hoping that Facebook's viral potential will take over. Participants are asked to declare a reason for their vote, which is then broadcast out to their friend networks via the news feed, broadcasting not only the application, but also an endorsement for their candidate to tens or hundreds of users. Shy users can opt out of that particular feature and cast an "anonymous" ballot.

Reactions from the tech and politics communities has been positive so far. Micah Sifry at Tech President is already calling the application the "most innovative political use of the Facebook Platform that I have seen so far, and if the League of Young Voters' application takes off, the primary could have a galvanizing effect among the millions of young people who spend upwards of two hours a day on the giant social network hub."

This may be true, though the project is not without pitfalls as well. From the standpoint of media and narrative, the project is a risky one, and rather than function as a cure for the "short shrift the media gives to young voters," the project could potentially backfire on its creators. One of the major media critiques of young voters is that they'd rather sit at home and play on Facebook than do the dirty, face to face work of political organizing. If more young people vote in the Facebook primary than in the real primaries, that might cement the image of young voters as political dilettantes who don't actually show up at the polls. Such a narrative do more harm to young voters than good.

The organizers are well aware of this danger, and have offered up a number of counterpoints, noting that the lists generated by the application will be used to direct unregistered voters to the Rock the Vote voter registration page, and that participating organizations will be contacting those who vote about turning out at the "real" polls on their state's primary day. They will also work to offer participants other ways to get involved off-line. If MoveOn and The League could convert that online energy among Facebook users into offline action, that would be truly impressive. But with a media more accustomed to writing their conventional wisdom than dealing with nuanced facts, it might be hard for organizers to message around discrepencies in turnout online vs. off-line.

Sifry is right that this is probably the most innovative use of Facebook this election cycle. Whether or not that turns out to be a good thing in the long run is yet to be seen.

• MTV and MySpace are partnering with LaVibra.com to offer streaming translations of their candidate dialogues.
• Down With Tyranny profiles Andrew Rice, a Flaming Lips Fan from Oklahoma who wants to be the youngest person in the Senate. Rice is challenging Global Warming denier Republican Senator James Inhofe. (The Starburst is a new feature. Click on it to read all about Senator Inhofe's record.)
• The League's New Mexico chapter got some great ink this week.
• Democrats Work has an innovative idea they are deploying in the Colorado 2nd Congressional District. The group is sponsoring a straw poll among Democratic Primary opponents with the catch that instead of voting, candidate supporters will be asked to donate canned goods and coats on behalf of their candidate. Dubbed the "Coats and Cans Primary," the winner will be the candidate whose supporters collect the most donations for the community.
• Al Gore's immensely popular Live Earth organization is now sporting the Rock the Vote Voter Registration Widget. It would have been nice to capture registrations during the concert, when attention was at its height, but this is still a fairly exciting partnership.
• Finally, IDPI has released a new report: Poli-fluentials: The New Politics of Influencers. I haven't yet read the report, which is pay-for-access, but it doesn't seem all that new if one is to judge by the abstract. Basically take The Tipping Point, and Robert Putnam's analysis of two personality types - machers and scmoozer - and you've got this report. In a nutshell: Some people are influencers for networks of people who think about things in a similar way. You must reach those people in order to influence their network. Some networks and people overlap, allowing you to create bridges between multiple networks. People have been talking about this for years - yes, even in politics.

It's been a shady week here at FM. Content has been light as I've been sick most of the week, and struggling through a major work crunch at both my day job and with the book. To top it all off, the site was down for an hour this morning. Sorry about that.

Next week I hope things will be back to normal, and I expect that I will also finally roll out that second big announcement I alluded to a couple weeks ago. In the meantime, here are a few stories you should check out:

• In a piece at Huffington Post, Jason Carter, grandson of the former President Jimmy Carter, lays out a case for a new, service-oriented politics, and promotes an organization we've profiled here at FM before: Democrats Work.
• The new student aid bill we blogged about earlier this summer emerged from conference committee yesterday. The bill, which is slated to reduce lender subsidies and substantially increase need-based student aid, will now go back to the House and Senate for approval. Details on the bill, how it came to pass, and the process moving forward can be found here. The Project on Student Debt has a fact sheet.
• The League has a new website. When things quite down, maybe I'll give it a review.