What is with these damn political interns?!

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Monday August 05, 2013 · 8:39 AM PDT

2013/08/05 · 08:39

I read a great article this weekend bemoaning the intern who leaked her month long experience working on the Weiner campaign as well as the low level Booker for Senate staffer who took issue with his job responsibilities of recruiting volunteers right to his superiors. Or even the Hill intern who came in still drunk and talking about his profound love for Paul Ryan... yeah that happened...

The writer, like me, has worked in politics for the last 10 years, and we've both seen quite our share of insane low level staffers filled with a sense of entitlement and expertise due to their $100,000 BA in Political Science.

I get it. You love The West Wing and House of Cards. You even like the BBC House of Cards. You were the president of your school’s college Democrats or Republicans. You tweet like crazy and read Politico. You deserve to be taken seriously. Oh wait, you don’t. You don’t know shit. I love and admire volunteers but I ain’t trying to give them the keys to the castle. You don’t blow in the door and act like you know everything. You’re not the manager, you certainly aren’t the consultant and there are 1000 reasons why that’s the case. Not the least of which is your cover story in the Daily News or your leaked email to reporters that outlines precisely how little you know about campaigns. I wouldn’t hire these two to do anything ever, and I bet these attention-seeking misjudgments will follow them around for a good while.

But here's the thing... maybe it isn't that all interns are filled with self-importance and entitlement... maybe it's that you're only hiring the self-entitled interns because their parents are big donors to the campaign or they're the only ones who can afford to work for free... Read More

Do you like DailyKos? Really?

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday August 01, 2013 · 12:09 PM PDT

2013/08/01 · 12:09

I like Daily Kos, do you like Daily Kos? How much do you like Daily Kos? No, really. Do you like us enough to actually click the "like" button??

Ok, I know I know.... I've been posting blogs this week about some of the innovative things that I get to do and work on at Daily Kos and asking you to join in the fun as well. This isn't some ploy to get you to click the like button, it's actually better than that.

Sarahkatheryn

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Wednesday July 31, 2013 · 8:30 AM PDT

2013/07/31 · 08:30

Hey. You just met me... and this is crazy, but here's an email, so open it, maybe?

If you're a regular at DK then you've probably seen an email or two from "Sarah Burris, Daily Kos" that usually ends with "in solidarity" or "Keep fighting" depending on the email topic. One of the big projects I've been working on since I started at Daily Kos is in making sure the blog posts that you all write about are being seen by a larger audience.

Why? Because y'all write some pretty good stuff, and more people should read it.

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday July 29, 2013 · 6:36 AM PDT

2013/07/29 · 06:36

If anyone ever tells you they can make something go viral they are either

Lying,
Famous, or
They've got an email list the size of President Obama with Facebook engagement levels the size of Upworthy.

To force something go viral you've got to have a ton of people that you're pimping it out to and asking them to share it. Or the alternative is to generate content that is so compelling that it garners traction from the simple fact that it doesn't suck.

Hi, I'm Sarah Burris, and I recently started working at Daily Kos.

This year at Netroots Nation I got to participate on a panel that talked about content creation and best practices for generating videos, photos, memes, micro-sites, etc... to promote your campaign. I was joined by Josh Bolotsky and Ericka Taylor of The Other 98%, Matt Ortega who does stuff on the internet, and Michael Crawford the Director of Online Programs at Freedom to Marry.

The others spoke about their experience doing fancy videos, finding good content online, and in Matt Ortega's case spending his free time designing websites that make fun of stupid republicans. But I talked about the 3 categories I have for memes and how you can approach generating your own content or repackaging more dense or complex content for your campaigns, or just for fun.

Here's what I do:

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday June 30, 2013 · 8:58 AM PDT

2013/06/30 · 08:58

Friday I went on Huffington Post Live during lunch (on the east cost) and talked about a topic that came up around young people turning more libertarian. This was sparked by a conversation from a DK blog post I shared on a listserv I moderate about youth and politics.

Among the issues we debated, a few things struck me as interesting when it comes to ways in which young libertarians are trying to re-frame what libertarianism is so as to broaden themselves to match their own desires.

Young people are libertarian because we're selfish and we want what we want when we want it, and
Rand Paul will win the Presidency in 2016 because he has cross appeal and will stay true to libertarian values.

Video on the flip:

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday June 06, 2013 · 4:32 AM PDT

2013/06/06 · 04:32

This week on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show my friend State Rep. Joe Dorman talked about the bill he's brought up in the Oklahoma legislature to mandate shelters and safe rooms for schools.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dorman has proposed this bill before. In fact he's brought up the issue in some capacity either through legislation or otherwise every year for the last 10 years. This isn't a new idea.

The problem is that most elected officials in Oklahoma don't want this to pass or to be law. Insane, I know, but here's why:

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday May 11, 2013 · 8:25 AM PDT

2013/05/11 · 08:25

This week the viral sensation of a high school student telling his teacher off made the rounds on the interwebs. Many with comments in support of him for pointing out that his teacher was giving the students busy work, as well as comments from others saying he should sit down and shut up as adolescents have been doing for decades.

These issues aren't new, right? Headline: Student isn't interested in what is being assigned. Stop the presses. But this particular student has a unique story that gives this issue a twist. He was a high school drop out who realized the value of education, and came back. Now he's being subjected to what he thinks is pointless busy work. He wants to see teachers engage students, have conversations, talk about issues, challenge them to think, not memorize, and he hurls this advice at his teacher as she sends him to the principal's office.

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday November 17, 2012 · 9:21 AM PST

2012/11/17 · 09:21

I've been on the ground this week in Arizona to help a campaign UNITE HERE invested in this year called Adios Arpaio. Adios Arpaio was a massive voter-registration campaign, aimed at voting out the notoriously anti-immigrant Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, that was led by 2,000 high school students, many of them the children of immigrants. We registered 35,000 new voters, and 70% of them are Latino. I've spent some time here before and many, many weeks since helping with everything I could.

Coming back after the election, I think part of me knew what I would hear, the same things we all hear about on the news: sarcastic and racist comments from poll workers, everyone who is different looking gets a provisional ballot...it's the same song for a different election. There's a familiarity that comes from being a person whose first election was 2000. This is the state of voting in contemporary America.

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday April 27, 2012 · 7:15 AM PDT

2012/04/27 · 07:15

Crossposted from FutureMajority.com

So much has been written about the youth vote in the last week as the President has been on his college tour talking about more affordable higher education - so I'm writing to set the record straight on what the deal is with young voters this election.

Bless his heart, Mitt Romney has tried to keep up by hosting his own youth focused conference call where he apparently spent most of the call bashing the Obama Administration but offering no solutions of his own. The call also seemed to be designed to push out his fancy infographic that outlines how bad things are for young people and implies the Obama Administration is at fault for the plight of youth.

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday May 05, 2011 · 2:36 AM PDT

2011/05/05 · 02:36

Ohhh republicans... bless their hearts. The Oklahoma Legislature is working on a bill that will be stronger than AZ's 1070 immigration law. If that isn't enough they're also working on English as the Official Language and I'm sure there are a lot of racist things around the corner.

Last week the Oklahoma Truth Council reported about a press conference by Republican State Treasurer Ken Miller and his Cinco de Mayo fundraiser. Only ... now I've obtained the official documents.

Just wait until you see the "sponsor levels."

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday February 05, 2010 · 3:50 AM PST

2010/02/05 · 03:50

Turns out if you do youth outreach in an election you have higher youth turnout.

If you read my take on the returns from the Massachusetts special election for the US Senate race then you know that Mass had some issues with reaching out to young voters. There was some confusion about who was going to do it.. or if it was going to happen... Someone even suggested the youth outreach was "well the President came..."

In the great state of Oregon we have a fantastic organization who has worked for years to get young voters to the polls, but also be engaged during years in between. The Oregon Bus Project worked the hell out of this special election and the results were noticeable.

In Massachusetts they had a turnout of 15% of 18-29 year olds for the special election. In the Oregon's special election about 24% turnout of youth voters (preliminary estimates from CIRCLE)

Sarahkatheryn

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday January 20, 2010 · 1:33 PM PST

2010/01/20 · 13:33

CIRCLE has numbers about yesterday's vote in the special election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts.

According to the briefing:

"Tisch College, Medford/Somerville, Mass - In the special election for Massachusetts Senator, young voters (age 18-29) preferred Democrat Martha Coakley over Republican Scott Brown by 58%-40% (with 2% for other candidates), according to a survey of 1,000 voters conducted on January 19, by Rasmussen Reports.

About 15% of Massachusetts citizens between the ages of 18-29 turned out to vote.* For citizens age 30 and older, turnout was about 57%.

For comparison: 25% of young citizens (age 18-29) voted in the 2008 Massachusetts presidential primaries, and 47.8% of young Massachusetts citizens voted in the 2008 presidential elections, according to CIRCLE’s analysis. Seventy-eight percent of under-30 voters in Massachusetts chose Barack Obama in the 2008 general election; 20% chose John McCain."

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What is with these damn political interns?!

Do you like DailyKos? Really?

Hey, did you get my Daily Kos email?

What's in a meme.. Will cats make my blogs go viral?

Young people aren't selfish, you are

My Friend Rep. Dorman on Maddow about Tornado Shelters

Everything's Bigger in Texas! Except Education.

The Story of One New Arizona Voter

Everybody is after the Youth Vote

OK Treasurer's Controversial Cinco de Mayo Fundraiser

Oregon Special Kills Mass in Youth Turnout

UPDATED: Are Democrats Abandoning Young Voters?