New York Times Profile of Declare Yourself is a Disaster

In keeping with my post earlier this week about the need for more investment in communications work within youth organizing, I want to point you all to a 1170 word profile of Television producer/major donor Norman Lear and his youth vote organization Declare Yourself.

Here are the main messages coming out of the piece:

Declare Yourself, which Mr. Lear founded in 2003 to spur 18- to 29-year-olds to vote, strives to register more than two million people by Election Day. A nonprofit organization, it registered about a million voters in the months leading up to the 2004 election, most of them that October, said Aviva Rosenthal, the organization’s director of partnerships.

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Four years ago Declare Yourself was simply one of many voter-registration efforts, admirable but probably without huge impact.

Message: 1 million voters is "not a significant impact" and by implication, youth in general did not have a huge impact in 2004.

Young people could be more crucial in the presidential race this time around — they played a bigger role than normal in many primary contests, and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has the trappings of a youth crusade. Thus organizations like Declare Yourself are taking on extra weight.

Message: Youth organizations weren't important until Barack Obama showed up. We didn't make him, he made us.

Rival registration efforts abound, but Declare Yourself is perhaps alone in using big media (anything controlled by the five largest media conglomerates) as its primary sales tool. Rock the Vote, which rose to prominence in the 1992 election by teaming up with MTV, comes close with its emphasis on musicians, but it has started relying more heavily on Internet outreach than on television.

This is bizarrely wrong. I would say that Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself are equally partnering with major media corporations. Both organization's biggest program this year involves online voter registration. If anything, Rock the Vote is the more innovative of the two organizations with new ways to using it's corporate and celebrity partnerships to increase registration. In reading the piece, however, the implication is that Declare Yourself's strategy is in some way superior.

Message: Corporate partnerships and Media are more important than internet outreach.

Mr. Lear toils to line up celebrities who have cachet among young adults. Through his wide-ranging contacts, he has corralled a roster of stars popular with young people to plug the cause, including America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”), Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”) and Tyra Banks (“America’s Next Top Model”). He said that he was trying to sign up the Jonas Brothers.

One of Declare Yourself’s biggest coups involved the MTV reality series “The Hills.” Mr. Lear and Ms. Rosenthal arranged for a star of that show to mention the registration effort during filming. As it turned out, producers liked the story line so much that they devoted the bulk of an episode to registering to vote.
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Citing internal research, Marc Morgenstern, executive director of Declare Yourself, said 83 percent of the people the organization registered in 2004 voted. “Yes, young people are assaulted with messages,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “That is why we have an overlapping approach. The cumulative impact gets them to the tipping point.”

Message: Celebrities and media campaigns are the best way to reach young voters.

At the moment, though, he is most focused on Declare Yourself. Whether registration efforts reap votes is a question that the organization cannot answer with precision. And as excited as registration groups, campaigns and others get about supposedly surging interest among younger voters every four years, the gains rarely prove to be substantial. The turnout rate in the last presidential election among voters 18 to 25 was 47 percent, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 64 percent for the overall population.

Message: Young people don't vote and we have no idea how to make them vote in bigger numbers.

This piece is a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we know:

• Young Voters have turned out in larger and larger numbers for the past 3 election cycles, and we were the only age demographic to vote in favor of John Kerry.
• Peer to peer outreach is the gold standard for moving young voters to the polls and it's effectiveness has been proven.
• Celebrity campaigns in and of themselves do not increase youth turnout.
• The internet is a huge and important tool for reaching out and engaging young voters.
• Youth organizations engaged in peer to peer outreach pioneered the tactics and laid the groundwork for Obama's successful youth operation.

This New York Times profile may serve the purpose of raising the profile of Declare Yourself and Norman Lear, but it does very little to advance the goals of the growing progressive youth movement. In fact, it is actively working at cross-purposes to that movement and teaching journalists and anyone who reads it precisely the wrong lessons about youth vote outreach.