College Democrats Backlash Understandable but Unfounded

When writing and researching Youth to Power, I knew that many in the College Democrats (current and alumni), would not like what I wrote. My book comes down pretty hard on College Democrats. It shouldn't come as a surprise, I've written similarly disapproving posts here on FM in the past. It seems the backlash has started.

I'm sure there are many excellent leaders in the College Democrats, and many individual chapters that excel. Nevertheless, as a whole the organization lags behind YDA and it's newer counterparts in many areas and I believe what I wrote to be accurate. Here's my response to a review published in the Politico by Ethan Porter, a former Executive Board member of the College Democrats.

In a review published by The Politico, Ethan Porter fails to offer a substantive critique of my book, Youth to Power, preferring to brush aside a majority of my observations and conclusions so he can settle scores for his own organization, the College Democrats, who come off rather poorly in its pages. His analysis is laughably lopsided.

In my book, I note that a boom in youth organizing - funded by disaffected donors, run by Millennials, and mostly occurring outside of the party structure (though also within through the Young Democrats) - adopted new tactics and strategies to reach young voters. These strategies included culturally appropriate, peer to peer outreach that treated young people as a valuable constituency of voters and engaged citizens, not as manual labor for campaigns or apathetic slackers. Over the course of the last 5 years, these new organizations have built a progressive youth movement from scratch that in differing ways lags behind, rivals and in others surpasses the conservative youth infrastructure.

Unfortunately, you wouldn't know any of this from reading Porter's review. To be sure, Porter feigns interest in the subject, noting the meteoric rise of Obama and expressing curiosity as to how it happened:

How and why did this happen? Who were the major players, and which organizations were most responsible?

These are important questions that deserve thoughtful answers. Unfortunately, Mike Connery’s “Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority,” fails to provide them.

Apparently 76 pages devoted exclusively to outlining those organizations, what they do, how they got started, who runs them, what they've accomplished, and where they still need to improve doesn't qualify in Porter's world. After briefly noting that I "get the big picture right," Porter ignores the bulk of the reporting in my book and, offering little in the way of evidence, states that my "provocative" thesis - outlined above - "misconstrues the nature of the recent upsurge in youth liberal activism."

Exactly what the true nature of the recent upsurge in liberal activism is, Porter never really says. In reading his review one is left with the feeling that it's got a whole lot more to do with Porter's own organization, the College Democrats. Unfortunately, neither he nor the College Democrats of America, with whom I spoke with during the writing of my book, can provide any proof that this is the case. What few examples Porter does hold up merely reinforce the points I make in my text.

Porter champions "small d democracy" and trumpets the College Democrats and the DNC as a shining example of "chaotic," decentralized activism. But decentralized doesn't mean unaccountable, and that's the real problem. It's fine if the College Democrats have a decentralized, nimble structure, as long as they accomplish real results which can be proven and replicated. Decentralize doesn't mean disconnected and mechanisms should be in place to report on activities and share best (and worst) practices. None of that data could be provided to me by the College Democrats.

Absent such controls, it is difficult to say just what the College Democrats do, which is one of the major problems with the organization during the time period on which I reported. There is little difference between the programming, structure and strategy of the College Democrats between 2004 and 2000, yet the results of the elections (in terms of youth participation) couldn't be more different. At the very best, that speaks well of Millennials, but is says very little about the College Democrats.

No, the real difference came not from the College Democrats, but from the new organizations that I discussed at length, and the cultural and peer-to-peer strategies they brought to the table. This was admirably documented by researcher Ryan Friedrichs in his study - Young Voter Mobilization in 2004 (pdf) and further explained in the report A Gift to Democrats (pdf) put out by Skyline Public Works.

Porter's final complaint seems to be that I failed to mention some of the stellar talent produced by the College Democrats. I have no doubt that CDA does produce some talent that do excellent work and go on to illustrious careers in Democratic politics. Just as I have no doubt that certain chapters of CDA are also very effective at what they do even if the organization as a whole is not. However both of these points completely miss what is important about the last few years and my arguments against the College Democrats.

At numerous points in the last few years, the College Democrats were afforded the opportunity to increase their budget by an order of magnitude. Time and again, they were offered the opportunity to run peer to peer field programs of the kind that YDA and the organizations of the [dot] Org Boom embraced. It is this infusion of money and investment in youth as a constituency to be organized that are making the difference, and in both of these areas the College Democrats are not a significant part of the picture. Maybe this will change in 2008, but it was not true during the writing of my book and in the time period on which I reported.

As for the connection between progressive youth organizing and the rise of Barack Obama, I freely admit that my book touches on this only briefly and offers little in the way of direct connections. Not because there aren't any, but because the final pages were written well before Sen. Obama's victory in Iowa at a time when Clinton actually led Sen. Obama in most youth polling. Alas, I was not able to see into the future while writing and researching my book.

But I continue to blog about this topic on Future Majority, and I've made note numerous times that Sen. Obama's campaign is a beneficiary of the strategies tested and pioneered in 2004 and 2006, as well as a pioneer themselves. Without question, his youth campaign, which is quite tight-lipped about their tactical operations, has expanded on these successes in ways that many of us could not even dream in 2004, but that was outside the scope of my book by virtue of the fact that when I was writing the book Obama's successes had not yet happened.

In the end, Porter's discontent with my book is understandable as I criticized an organization of which he was a part. Yet that bias clearly clouded his judgment in his review, and his critique offers little to disprove my claims or uphold his own.