widgets

• Campus Politico notes that there is a large drop-off of voting among young people in down-ballot races. Matt Stoller at Open Left lets us know that the Obama campaign is hoping to change that. He posts a copyof an Obama campaign email reminding him to vote down ballot.
• Pew Research provides a preview of how exit polling will be conducted on Tuesday, and how early voting and an influx of new voters will be factored into those polls. Good reading for those who will be looking at the numbers on E-Day.
• The website for The Youngest Candidate, an excellent film that follows four 18 year-olds as they run for public office, is now live. It's got some great design work done by Shepard Fairey
• Tim Fernholz at Tapped thinks that campgain widgets like the Obama tax calculator are the future of issue campaigning.
• The folks at Overdetermined, a new blog about data analysis, have some pre-election gallows humor:

• The whack jobs at Human Events detail the "pernicious effects" of voter registration drives on American civic life. Ooh scary.
• Obama's in-game X Box ads cost $44,000. Chump change when you raise $150m in one month.
• Mobilize.org spotlights a new report on college affordability.
• Here's a late entry - Al Gore's address to the Power Vote coalition. My gut says this was probably very motivating to the diehards in the coalition who are doing GOTV and signing people up to take the Power Vote pledge. I found it a little dry coming after Obama's program last night, but I was glad to see Gore speak positively about youth involvement rather than advocating for ineffective strategies from his youth:

Update: I've heard from someone involved in this project that the calls will indeed be pro-Obama, and that there will likely be a down-ballot message delivered as well. Participating artists are also going to use the text message reminders I mentioned in this post. Good stuff.
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Music for Democracy recently launched a widgetized GOTV campaign, called Be the Change. Here's the widget:

The idea is this - recruited musicians agree to record a GOTV message, as well as make a few live calls on election day. They then seed the program to their fan base by posting the widget on their website/Myspace page, emailing their list, posting on message boards, etc. Fans of those artists then sign up to receive a reminder to vote on election day, and theoretically continue to spread the word virally by posting the widget to their own blogs/social networking pages, and potentially in other music forums.

It's an interesting concept and I have no idea how effective it will be. We know that text message reminders on election day can bump turnout by 4.6 percentage points. But we also know that robocalls are the least effective way of reaching young people. That might be alleviated by the fact that users are opting in to receive these messages, and the messenger will be a respected figure with whom the recipient has some connection (however tangentially in the form of fandom). However, that also makes me wonder about selection bias. Are the people opting in the types of people who were already going to vote, or is this actually going to convince someone who would have stayed home to go to the polls?

The other question I have about the project has to do with scripts for the artist. Will the artist deliver a pro-Obama message or a non-partisan message? Will the script discuss the importance of voting down ballot? Democracy Corps is estimating that down-ballot drop-off could be quite high among young voters. If the Music for Democracy tool could cut down that rate, that would indeed be useful.

I'm not sure if MfD is testing the effectiveness of the tool, but I hope they are. This would all be good data to have.

• The MySpace Impact Channel just got a makeover. The political section of MySpace is now actually readable and usable.
• In other MySpace news, the site is now partnering with PayPal on what it is describing as a "viral" fundraising widget. The site says it will also be rolling out special profiles for political activists and organizations. Look out FaceBook and Think MTV.
• New America Foundation notes that despite the passage of the Cost of College Reduction Act, there is still a chance that the new Pell Grant maximum will not be fully funded if President Bush vetoes the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Budget Bill. So far it's not clear whether or not the budget will pass with a veto proof majority.
• Over 500 organizations are now using the Rock the Vote voter registration Widget, including Tyra Banks, who has apparently registered 700 young women of color since she featured the widget in a show with Barack Obama.
• The Washington Post turns a critical eye on Obama's youth strategy.

Cross-posted at Tech President. Welcome Tech President readers.

Josh Levy at TechPresident tipped me off to a new, nonpartisan youth politics site that is getting ready to soft launch next week - Our Voice 2008.

On signing up for the site, users complete a profile which includes a sliding-scale ranking of the issues that most concern you (there are about 10 issues between which the scales help you divvy up 100 "points") and rate each of the Presidential candidates. Each month, OV2008 will offer nonpartisan descriptions of various issues (talk about a minefield! How do you describe abortion or health care or any issue in a way that is both useful and unbiased? Solutions have to come from somewhere.) and poll their user-base for their opinions on that issue. Users will be able to display this information on their social networking profiles or websites via widgets developed by OV2008, while the organization itself will push the information out to the presidential campaigns in an attempt to influence the debate.

The idea is interesting, but with such an unscientific method of polling, it will need to reach a very large critical mass of users if it is to produce information of any use to the campaigns, media, or even local organizers. Unfortunately, the project is running very much under the radar at the moment, and the first major data collection period is almost up (October 1st). There's no way to know from the site how many people have created profiles, though with a respectable if insufficient 1,000 friends on Facebook and a paltry 16 friends on MySpace, the project does not appear to have anything close to critical mass, which I place (at minimum) around a few thousand participants in each of the 50 states (or at least the first 5 or 6 primary states). Without that critical mass, it's unclear to me how this becomes more useful to campaigns, media outlets, or nonprifits like Rock the Vote than the internal polls they already produce.

I spoke with Ryan Comfort, the founder of Our Voice 2008, about these issues and Comfort acknowledged that attaining critical mass is the key, and pointed out that they are only in the initial stages of their operation, with the website barely a few weeks old. He and a team of students at the University of Pennsylvania (Comfort is a recent Wharton graduate) are currently working on creating a campus outreach plan. Once that plan is complete, Our Voice 2008 will begin to recruit volunteers at universities across the country whose job it will be to build support for the organization among students.

Even if Our Voice 2008 never reaches the critical mass to become a viable project (the most likely outcome, I think), it remains a solid idea that a more established organization might be able to execute. The idea of insta-polling a large and geographically group of young voters is not radically different from what MySpace and MTV are set to do during their candidate dialogues. The technology is already out there. An organization like Rock the Vote just might have a big enough brand to pull create a critical mass of users, and enough clout within the political community to actually get the campaigns to pay attention to the results.

But then again, since merging with Young Voter Strategies, Rock the Vote already has its own polling and research arm, so the question becomes, is there value added in snap polling in addition to the more methodical polling the organization already employs? I think yes. I'm 29 years old, and never in my life (even when I had a landline) have I been polled. I think a lot of young voters might jump at the chance to participate in such a polling process provided they could:

• Participate remotely and on their own schedule via a social networking widget.
• They knew that the organization conducting the polls was working in the interests of young voters.
• They knew that the organization was committed to pushing the results to the media and the political campaigns.
• They saw that commitment through increased/changed coverage and campaign messaging.

If such a project could operate like the Rock the Vote voter registration widget, and allow organizations to create their own versions and maintain user data, this could be a very interesting development. It remains to be seen of OV2008 can pull it off, or if another organization is willing to pick up on it.

Over at ePolitics, Colin Delaney smacks the candidates for their failure to use widgets.

Note to campaign staffers: got 60,000 friends on MySpace and wonder how you're gonna get them to be volunteers/donors? Widgets are what you are looking for. The potential for ChipIn alone is amazing If those 60,000 friends each used ChipIn to raise you $50 bucks via their MySpace page, and you got a 10% return, that's $300,000 - more than enough to pay the salary of your social networking director and your whole national youth staff for the duration of the primary and general election.

From Delaney:

Obviously, campaign widget use is still in its infancy. What would a comprehensive political widget strategy look like? Let’s divide the little critters into two basic categories: those that spread a message and those that actively solicit support. Message-spreading widgets could display just about any content that you can either fit into or reference in an RSS feed, including:

• News headlines
• Recent blog posts
• Campaign photos, via a photo-sharing site or from a dedicated photo gallery
• Campaign video clips (either embedded or as a link to a clip displayed on the main campaign site)
• Upcoming events, geo-targeted by the blog/site owner during the widget setup or generic across all supporter sites
• The supporter/volunteer of the day, with photo

Widgets that actively solicit support or user input could:

• Raise money
• Gather email addresses
• Highlight volunteer opportunities
• Gather opinions, polling-style