In an earlier article I compared 2020 turnout performance by party and identified two first-rate voter registration efforts on our side. Bottom line: the March For Our Lives voter registration system seems capable of acquiring votes in the 18-29 group at $2 each. This compares favorably with the $60 a vote we’re spending overall.
We need to change the country. To make getting registered to vote something automatic. Something the kids plan on from when they turn 16. Get at least 80% registered before they turn 19.
And this little gal Billie Eilish is a gift from the gods. Now 107,000,000 Followers. Surely 120,000,000 for November 2024. Her fans / stans / family click through by the millions to get registered.
Our Christian Fascist Republicans see her as a mortal enemy. Young people vote because of people who show up for the Democratic Party and remind their followers to get registered and vote.
[ NOTE: As of Sunday evening Billie’s 107,000,000 Follower Instagram account is freshly sabotaged.
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The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.
Billie is 20 years old. There’s nothing here involving hate speech, drugs, booze or porn. OTOH: Facebook owns Instagram.]
What Billie has been doing, hundreds of performers can do. And for damn sure, getting each new wave of 18-year olds registered ASAP is critical today to maintain democracy.
Back to normal business, I looked at the underlying voter demographics and what actuarial tables tell us about arrivals and departures from the major parties’ critical age groups.
Young people go Democrat. Old people go Republican. By 28% and 11% respectively.
First, the demographic good news. That’s for Democrats. We have approx 4,000,000 kids turning 18 every year for a decade.
That’s 8,000,000 living, breathing citizens that we can register for first-time voting in 2024.
We need to get off our butts. No excuses. No last-minute time lines.
We also need to overpower our office-holders’ dinosaur fear of AOC-like ambushes in primaries.
The country may very well have another 364 AOCs. As our dinosaurs know, House Districts are small enough to carry out ambush campaigns in primaries.
The dinosaurs’ worries are real. We just have to go around them — they’re like the dinosaurs that got Howard Dean canned from DNC years back. Like Sean Patrick Maloney: anti-Left, GOP-neutral.
Unlimited, uncontrolled voter registration produces way too much democracy for these guys.
Once we get these kids registered to vote, we’re seeing 66% turnout. That’s better than twice the overall 18-29 ratio in November (27%) and triple the average for 20 years prior to 2018 (approx 20%.)
We’re only getting 41% registered for the whole 18-29 group. Which is pitiful. If we only got 41% registered in the month that they turned 18, that would still be a lazy effort.
We get off our butts, we can get 50% 18-29 turnout in midterms and 60% in presidentials. Nobody among the professionals says that. But it’s true. Apply standard Lessons Learned operations analysis to the MFOL and Future Farmers of America systems and you see it happening everywhere it is applied.
That’s what happens when these kids are contacted and invited in. Thing is, it’s not that hard to get it done. Copy MFOL then the 66% turnout for kids who are registered dominates.
Consider: Alabama, Alaska and Mississippi are notorious for discouraging the young from registering to vote. In states like that we pro-democracy folk will need to walk the kids through. Train them up for democracy.
If Ukraine can stand up, so can we.
Second, there’s the demographic bad news. That’s for Republicans. Consider their everybody’s-registered lots-of-them-vote 45-64 & 65+ groups. They’re losing short of 3 million a year to permanent departures.
For 2024 that means a decline of 5,000,000++ for the pools of citizens most vulnerable to Christian Fascism propaganda.
We know that Republicans run voter registration drives in nursing homes. Dementia be damned. Put simply, the Republicans are desperate.
We’re up by 8,000,000 and they’re down by 5,000,000++ going from 2022 to 2024.
And this repeats with regularity well into the 2030s. We get the kids of these cycles registered to vote and the Christian Fascist / White Nationalist / Republican situation is hopeless.
Well, short of insurrection.
By the way it’s only barely possible that right wing media outlets will be able to poison new arrivals aging up-and-out of the 30-44 group. That is, that they can keep the 45-64 & 65+ groups living in their fantasy world.
Sadly for them there is no “The Apprentice” today and Trump is basically a walking cartoon, a fattened up roadrunner.
So far mass acceptance of the Big Lie and the like are not taking over 40-49 and the early 50s. Not yet.
Research there does get to complicated issues right off. Region and issues and economics/professions correlate strongly with results. Another article ??? = at least one
Say whatever, Republicans have their eggs in a Culture Wars basket.
They also use economic power to support fascist attacks on democracy. Deleting the Billie Eilish account at Instagram is a fine example.
Their voters are the very people they victimize with their budget choices. And also victimize with their lawlessness — the Texas power grid for a prime example.
Their voters have to do cra-cra. Such as believing that there is such a thing as a Woke Mob.
Bottom line for the current 45-64 and 65+ population is that they will see roll-over of their 66-million head-count to the tune of 25+ million in the period 2023 to 2034.
The Republican Party has nothing going to deal with this change. They’re too busy sorting out Trump’s criminality and their submission deals with their billionaires. And Fox News is selling a bizarre combination of Trumpism without Trump and DeSantis-as-Peron.
The Democratic Party blew a solid opportunity in 2022. The grassroots operations got the turnout. Getting 27% participation from 18-29 was not the party’s doing.
Without Hogg / MFOL and Billie Eilish heroics, it looks like we would have seen the 20% 18-29 participation like the years prior to 2018.
Instead, with their contributions, we got the 27% participation that saved our bacon.
For 2023 and 2024 the voter registration efforts for incoming 18-year olds have to be taken away from the dinosaur professionals. On the evidence, they are not on our side.
The MFOL system replicates at approx $2 a vote. The key is asking for people’s time instead of their money. The party is spending $60 a vote now. The system works reasonably well, every state of the union. SUGGESTION: Reduce funding for the obnoxious, repetitive television ads.
And surely there is a way to expand Eilish’s participation, for example with an hour of video shoots tailored to the internet and targeting support for the Legislative Branch. Rumor has it that Kamala has her number.
David Hogg, a couple weeks ago: “As anybody who’s studied 20th century history can tell you, the first unsuccessful insurrection is always the last and nothing bad ever happens after the insurrectionists and their leaders get a slap on the wrist. Ever. Never. At all. And everyone lives happily ever after.”
FINALLY………. That Billie Eilish account is gold for Democrats. For registration and for turnout. We should preserve it. And recruit hundreds of people in the arts to replicate her appeals.