Leighton Woodhouse of Driving Votes recently noted in
a diary on MyDD that the Young Democrats of America are in need of some serious reforming. I couldn't agree more, and I've got a few thoughts on what needs to be done - from a vision and from a strategic standpoint - to accomplish this. With the YDA conference about to go down in San Francisco next week, now is the perfect time to give this topic a full airing.
To let you all know where I'm coming from, my real name is Michael Connery and I'm a founder of Music for America - one of the groups Leighton mentioned in his post. The essay is loosely divided into two parts. The first focuses on why we need to focus more on young voters and where our "Youth Outreach" typically goes wrong. The second part examines some models of what I see as the way forward for young democ-ratic/progressive organizations.
(This is long. Dive in after the jump.)
Part 1: The Importance of young voters, and where "Youth Outreach" goes horribly wrong
Why you should care about this:
I won't be shy about saying that "youth organizing," "youth issues," or most things that might fall under those rubrics get short shrift on the major blogosphere sites. Granted, Kos and Atrios and Chris Bowers have all made efforts to point out what's going on - Atrios posts liberally about Drinking Liberally, Bowers gives Young Philly Politics shout-outs, and Kos has made multiple mentions of Cosmopolity and Music for America on his site - but for the most part, these topics are never picked up by the community. This surprises me since we've all seen the demographic breakdowns on dailykos. My peers are in the blogosphere, they just don't speak or post from a generational point of view.
That is unfortunate, because "activating" and organizing young voters is incredibly important for the Democratic Party. 2004 was a record year for youth turnout. (PDF) Turnout was up to 51% (from 34%) nationwide, and turnout in swing states reached as high as 64%. It turned out that The Kids Were Alright in 2004. Their partici-pation was a big boon to John Kerry, and as Joe Trippi noted in the WSJ, it saved his ass from McGovern-esque riducule. Kerry carried young voters by a 10-point margin - a dramatic improvement over Al Gore's split decision with Dubya in 2000 - and the "kids" were only age demographic to break in favor of the Democrats.
But to say that Kerry carried young voters is misleading. Many of us cast our ballots not for Kerry, but against Bush. Like a page out of the Daily Show playbook, the reigning ethos among our generation was "John Kerry is a douchebag but I'm voting for him any-way." There's no guarantee that my generation, or future generations, will stand by the Dems in '06 or `08. We've got to step up our efforts if we're going to keep them. And we need to - it's more than Kerry's inability to carry his own generation, or the failure of the greatest generation to vote for the greatest good. 1990 witnessed the highest birthrate since the height of the baby boom. Over 17 million teenagers will turn 18 between November 3rd 2004 and November 2008. Right now Democratic organizations are woefully under-prepared to turn these political new-comers into self-identifying progressives, let alone bring them into the Democratic Party. The Republicans are already stepping up their efforts to rebrand themselves among this next generation in politics. They're staking territory, and unless we can reimagine groups like the Young Democrats and the College Democrats, and retool outreach programs by organizations like ACT and the Democratic National Committee as they relate to 18-30 year olds, we could lose this crucial demographic, or - just as bad - fail to activate enough of them to help us carry an election.
Politics is a four-letter word; culture is what happens when you get out of bed
Before we can restructure our "youth" oriented program activities, we must identify the problem (and let me just say that the term "youth" preceding everything in politics in-volving people under 30 is itself part of the problem, albeit a part that is extremely diffi-cult to remedy when speaking in a meta-context).
At its most root level, it is a matter of perception, world-view, framing (or whatever term you want to assign it). For the majority of "young" Americans, politics isn't important in the same way it is for us junkies. In fact, politics is a dirty word. This seems like a no-brainer, but the manner in which "youth outreach" programs of the Young Democrats, College Democrats, DNC, and ACT work illustrate that this fact remains deeply unabsorbed. It is a constant that is always in people's minds, but never fully comprehended or accounted for during planning sessions, retreats, and daily meetings.
This should come as no surprise. Politicians and political groups are particularly inept when it comes to operating outside the realm of the established norms of the beltway - canvassers on campuses, "bar nights" where younger folks have to pay to meet a politician seeking their vote (how insane is that - asking an apathetic or apolitical college student or young professional to pay for the pleasure of hearing an earnest pencil pusher or a smarmy egomaniac speak platitudes?!?!?!), if we're lucky, the occasional road trip may crop up.
The problem here, as Leighton pointed out, is that many of the people running these programs view "youth outreach" as basic training for the big leagues. What the entire De-mocratic infrastructure needs to realize is that voters under 30 need completely different programs to increase their participation, not a beta-version of a real campaign, run by an endless series of ladder climbers looking to get to the next rung in their political career.
Case in point, this list of activities was posted on the Daily Kos by a member of the San Fernando Valley Young Dems the last time this topic was raised. It is a list of their group's activities:
- Took bus trips to campaign for 2 California Assemblywoman in swing districts.
- Raised $1000 for the local Democratic headquarters selling buttons outside Farenheit 9/11.
- Set up a booth at the San Fernando Valley Fair and saw the world's biggest pig.
- Held an issues summit entitled "The Day After 9/11" highlighting domestic security is-sues.
- Personally interviewed all five leading Los Angeles mayoral candidates.
These are great things, but they are all highly political things. These are not things that most people want to do, these are things that highly motivated activists or pre-professional politicos like to do. I spend most of my day thinking and reading about poli-tics, and I don't want to do half of these things (which is different from understanding the necessity of doing them). Does that make them less valuable or unimportant? No. Do I recommend that Young/College Dems stop doing these things? No. Do I think having a laser focus on these types of activities is bad for Young Dems and bad for the progressive movement?
You bet.
99% of the people out there won't find taking a road trip to canvass for someone they've never heard of in 90 degree weather to be an exciting prospect, and we shouldn't organize local dem chapters or young dem programs under the assumption that it is exciting, or even the most important thing we can do. Putting most of our "youth outreach" energies into projects like these is what keeps us from maximizing our natural advantage over conservatives among younger voters, and ignores our greatest weapon against the conserva-tives - culture.
If we want to build a progressive majority, our coalition cannot be composed solely of folks who drink the Kool Aid. We need to tailor our activities so we can involve the greatest amount of people, and use this larger pool to gradually move people up a ladder of participation that gets increasingly political in nature the higher up you get. This should be the goal of "youth outreach" programs, and this idea should be the basis for every ground campaign and recruitment program geared towards younger voters. The rub here is that we can't force these people to conform to our world-view. 99.9% of them will never be as politicized as we'd like them to be. So in order to succeed, we've got to adapt our own assumptions and ideas into their worldview. This was the realization that made Music for America so successful:
If you want to get apolitical youth involved in politics, you have to make political participation a cultural phenomenon.
Part II - How to use culture to first inform and involve, and later active "young" voters
In Part I of this essay, I outlined what I believe to be a fundamental flaw in efforts by democratic groups to reach young voters - namely that they are blinded by the beltway and come on too strong with the politics out of the gate to interest more than a tiny frac-tion of their peers, when they should be integrating their programs more fully into the lives of the people they are trying to reach. The Right already does this with churches (as everyone around here no doubt is tired of hearing), and if we want to reach young voters, we need to employ our own secret weapon - culture. We need to do with concert venues and comedy clubs, bars and coffee shops what the Right does with churches.
(I'll forestall comments from the religious left here - I agree with what you do and ap-plaud it. We need to be in churches as well, I merely employ this over-used example to help illustrate my point, not to imply that your guys aren't out there trying to take back religion.)
That was the simple idea behind all of MfA's successes (as well as that of groups like Drinking Liberally, Punk Voter, Head Count, Concerts for Kerry/Change). We took politics, which was a topic of taboo in youth culture - an automatic badge of unhipness - and, by integrating it into the cultural fabric, changed the entire frame through which our generation perceived it. For the kids we reached, politics wasn't a freakish entity floating at the margin of their lives anymore. It was about going to good shows and hanging out with their friends, seeing a good band or having a beer. And somewhere in all that socializing and normalcy, they register to vote and get a little bit more informed. After more than 2400 shows across the county, politics became part of a typical Saturday night out.
Groups like YDA, College Dems, Clickback America, etc all need to embrace the other people out there who aren't as political as we are, and realize that it is OK that they don't want to do some of the highly political activities we organize. The active left needs to recognize that it's OK - no, its VALUABLE - to have a large pool of voters who are mildly informed and involved through their everyday activities, even if they never pariticpate in any of your "boots on the ground" activites. Our job is to organize enough events with mass appeal to keep a large majority of folks interested and informed at the most basic level. Simultaneously, we should use these informal settings to find people who can be "brought up to the next level." Give people the opportunity to become in-volved at their own pace and do your damndest to keep them loosely connected until they do decide to increase their participation.
Localism, Integration and Peer to Peer vs. Broadcast and One-Off Events
I've said a lot about the philosophy behind successful outreach to younger voters, but haven't yet gotten into the nitty-gritty "How To" of it. There were lots of attempts in the last 2 years to involve young people in politics through culture, but some worked better than others. Here I'd like to outline two examples - one illustrating the wrong way to use culture, and one outlining the correct way.
Vote for Change:
I'll start with what was widely recognized as the "biggest" music/political event of cam-paign 2004. I say biggest because it was the most widely reported, but in the grand scheme of music and politics in 2004, VfC represented only a small percentage of the to-tal events, and probably changed no one's mind about anything. I may step on people's toes here, but I regard Vote for Change as a weird combination of utter failure and great success. Vote for Change succeeded in a task which was never stated as its main goal - raising money for ACT and MoveOn. It failed completely in the task which it claimed as its main objective - forming a union of populist politics and pop culture that convinced people to vote Democratic.
This outcome was always inevitable based on the way in which the concerts were orga-nized. Vote for Change was a series of large shows offering viewers (and I purposely say viewers rather than participants) very little intimate contact and a range of performers geared more towards people 30 years of age or older.
The size of the shows were a problem because the entire event became depersonalized. With no contact with the artists, and little to no contact with anyone on hand to discuss the politics of the event one-on-one, the events became advertisements - an embodiment of broadcast communication just as easily tuned out as the car commericals we skip with our TiVOs. The very size of the concerts distorted Vote for Change's attempted merger of culture and politics into a campaign rally in cultural drag. Combined with it's massively high-profile, and the fact that it was organized for explicitly partisan political purposes - I think the argument can be made that the concerts may have had a blowback effect on total democratic votes due to the negative publicity it received from the conservative press. Certainly it made people more cynical about the mixing of culture and politics, which in the end is bad for us if we plan to use culture as a driver of participation.
The choice of artists at VfC was equally disruptive of achieving the tour's stated goals. Signing acts like The Boss and James Taylor targeted older voters who's patterns of voting were already well established, at the expense of younger voters who's political ideologies have not yet calcified and/or who may not be habitual voters. In light of this, I'm not even sure that the events could have drummed up more Democratic votes if every person attending was granted a 5 minute personal interview with Bruce Springstein himself.
Music for America:
In all ways, Music for America was the opposite of Vote for Change. We didn't invent a tour wholesale with a political purpose, we piggy-backed on shows which were already scheduled and would have taken place no matter our involvement. We didn't even do the "large tour" thing for the most part, (Interestingly, the few stadium tours we piggybacked were some of the least successful shows we were involved with. The exception to this was the Warped Tour, on which we had 10 volunteers per day, a stringer on the tour bus, and our own booth in the merch village - basically we were completely integrated into the tour.)
The average MfA event had 3-500 people in attendence. These shows had 2-3 volunteers tabling and flyering the show - enough that during the course of the evening almost everyone at the show could theoretically either have a conversation with a volunteer (before the show, during set breaks, or afterwords), or was given some information about MfA and a cam-paign issue that was directly related to their lives - either culturally or politically). Between October 2003 and November 2004, we held approximately 2,400 shows attended by around 2 million people.
MfA worked because it became an established presence in the communities in which it operated. Saturday night at the Troc in Philly? MfA is probably there. Friday night at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC - MfA's got a table. Tuesday night local Hip Hop night in Detroit - there's the MfA crew passing out issue cards and talking about the Rave Act. You can't just have one-off events and expect to make a cultural connection with your community and peers. If all your organization is doing is throwing one Kegger every 3 months when you need to raise money, you are not integrating yourself into the culture, you are exploiting the culture for political ends - Just like ACT and MoveOn were when they hired Bruce to tour the Swing States.
Studies show that the best motivator for political participation is being asked by a friend or peer. By operating in multiple small venues, spread across the nation, where direct, peer to peer contact was possible, MfA was able to accomplish this on a massive scale with over 2 million people reached at almost 2,500 shows. That's the other key to success with cultural events - if this strategy is going to work, its got to be local, local, local, and its got to be underground with the musicians - the little bands that everyone loves because they think no one knows about them except their small clique. It can't be all headliners and mass-scale.
Conclusion: Props to other groups. Broadening the Argument. What I left Out.
I've focused solely on the two extreme examples in my mind of what to do and what not to do when using culture to reach voters, and because of my experience, music has been my prime example. But there were plenty of other groups geared at raising involvement, awareness and money that utilized culture successfully, and they didn't all revolve around concerts. Drinking Liberally went from 0 to almost 100 chapters nationwide in the last two years with almost no staff. Once a week, all over the country from NYC to Utah you can go and have a few beers and talk politics with friends and strangers. Drinking Liberally is a fantastic model for the kind of organizing that the Young Democrats and the College Democrats need to embrace, and they're getting ready to expand their efforts into new projects like Laughing Liberally, which will focus on weekly comedy events, and Reading Liberally, a book club.
Concerts for Change (which became Concerts for Kerry) operated a fundraising operation, much like Vote for Change, but worked more like Music for America, recruiting hip, slightly underground talent to perform at small events. With only 99 concerts, they were able to raise more than $730,000 while still providing the kind of one-on-one, intimate contact that concertgoers received at Music for America events. Imagine what a hybrid of these organizations could accomplish.
I'm sure I'm leaving tons of details out here, as well as short-changing a lot of other groups that did fantastic work like Running for Change, Run Against Bush, Driving Votes, Head Count and Punk Voter to name just a few.
I've said little about the kinds of messaging that needs to happen at these events. For some of them, like Drinking Liberally, there is no overarching messaging because the events are inherently social and networking events. Just steering the topic of conversation towards current events and making an announcement or two is enough. MfA had a system of messaging that tied multiple issues together and related it directly to the lives of the people we spoke to (like jobs, the environment and the war on terror under the guise of a national energy policy a la the Apollo Alliance, or the connection between the drug war and student loan aid). I'm also aware that it may seem like I'm making light of the fact that there is no system to build a Progressive Bench - no way for us to train and foster candidates, writers and organizers like the right does.
I assure you I take all of that seriously, but the methods with which we reach out to younger voters is just as important an issue. More important, I'd argue because they will form the foundation for all those other programs and activities. I also believe that the issue I've spoke about is one that gets extremely short shrift in the blogosphere among Reform Democrats.
We need to shift our "youth organizations" focus away from career building for the big leagues and get them to start teaching the next generation in American Politics how to Live Liberally. This needs to happen through culture - in concert halls and comedy clubs, bars and coffee shops. If we don't, the new Baby Boom that began in 1990 might just end up destroying the so-called Emerging Democratic Majority.