Hey Democrats - Don't Bash Young Voters in the Press, Talk To Us

I'm guest blogging for The Nation for the next month. I'll be posting 3 - 4 posts per week, some of which will be cross-posted here.

My first piece went up today. It's a rebuttal to that Paul Maslin piece in Salon last week:

For as long as I've been involved in youth organizing (about five years now), our most difficult adversary has been the press. During the 2004 election, the media over-hyped the circus that was P. Diddy's "Vote or Die," while ignoring the real work on the ground done by groups with far less star power (and consequently a smaller draw for a rag looking to sell papers or pull in eyeballs). After the election, despite large gains made in youth turnout and participation, the media largely botched its analysis by falsely declared the youth vote – once again – little more than electoral vaporware.

It's been one of the great victories for the youth organizing community this cycle that the media narrative has finally – and surprisingly, accurately – turned in our favor. Which is why I was hugely disappointed this weekend to read a piece in Salon written by Democratic pollster and fellow Deaniac Paul Maslin that proclaimed the youth vote to be "not that big of a deal."

To be fair, Maslin gets it right when he says that youth turnout is about more than Obama. The increases we've seen are a long time in coming and are due to a confluence of factors including: the increased size and natural engagement of the Millennials generation, over four years of organizing work in the field and online to engage young voters on the part of progressive youth organizers, and a real devotion of time and campaign resources on the part of the Democratic Presidential candidates.

But Maslin gets it wrong when he tries to lay blame for Kerry's loss at the feet of young people. Voters under 30 not only increased their turnout in larger numbers than any other age demographic in 2004, they were also the only age demographic to vote for John Kerry over President Bush. Maslin's thinking is common among youth-vote critics who clutch to a nonsensical binary world-view that a friend of mine summed-up rather aptly: "Everyone expects young people to fail until they succeed, and then they didn't succeed enough."

Read the rest here.