YDA Day 2: Building Consensus

There’s a strange dynamic going on here. The conference is in part hosted by the New Hampshire Democratic Party, and there’s a noticeable lack of coordination (or maybe collaboration is the better word) between YDA and NHDP.

This morning began with a breakfast sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party, along with a session hosted by Michael Dukakis. The breakfast started an hour late, for reasons that aren’t clear to me, and bumped into the morning workshop schedule, as did Dukakis, who I hear drew a sizeable YDA crowd. The result was that YDA and NHDP were competing with each other for bodies, and the morning sessions seemed a little thin. This could also be due to the fact that everyone was out last night at a party sponsored by the Stonewall Democrats. It’s hard to tell since I could only see what was happening in the sessions I attended.

After yesterday’s Hillary Fest, the conference has evened out in terms of candidate support (Elizabeth Edwards got the best reception during the luncheon). There are representatives and volunteers from all of the major campaigns on site, but the crowd is now decidedly mixed in terms of age. Some of the sessions are New Hampshire Party events just as much, if not more than they are YDA events.

Thus far I’ve sat in on two full sessions and lurked around the edges of another during its final minutes. The blogging session went well, and filled up about half way through as the breakfast ended. I’m fully immersed in the blogosphere. I’ve got almost 100 blogs on my RSS reader that I skim everyday, and most of my activism is done online. So it’s always amazing to me when I walk out of that bubble and into a room of folks who don’t really know what the blogosphere is, how to jump into it, or why it can be a valuable tool and ally for their own work. That was something of the case today, as the room had a truly mixed level of experience with blogs. One participant, from Oakland, was an avid Calitics reader and knew all about the virtues of blogs. Another from Upstate New York had never heard of The Albany Project.

This mix of experience and savvy is something I’m noticing a lot today. I’ve heard people in the hallways fumbling to talk about the recent Cost of College Reduction and Access Act, and I’ve heard others talking about the minutia of budgeting and voter file development. This is an organization that is still very young in the sense that just 3 years ago, they completely changed the way they organize, and this wasn’t a change universally welcomed by the membership. In 2005, YDA held a highly contested election over the future direction of the party, and the current leadership are still working to get the membership to buy-in to their new strategy. It’s also a young organization literally in the composition of its membership, and the YDAs here are all trying to get a better handle on how YDA fits into American politics, and what they can do on the ground in their local community.

More on the flip.

On the whole, my impression is that YDA would be better off ditching the New Hampshire Party and running this more like a Roots Camp. There’s clearly a large differential in skill level and knowledge here, and sharing that information is probably the best thing that YDA could do to become more effective on the ground. Speeches from campaign surrogates and local officials are fine, but they shouldn’t come at the expense of real training, networking, and education. This morning, it feels like the things of real value at the conference were sacrificed in favor of the star-fucking events with the campaigns.

The session on running for delegate to the 2008 DNC was informative in terms of process (and a convoluted process it is, with 50 different ways to run depending on which state one lives in), but it was run by a staffer from the DNC, so it glossed over completely the fact that YDA was recently in a fight with the DNC over the delegate selection process. It was a valuable session, but it also felt like an opportunity was missed to get the entire organization on the same page w/r/t their delegate campaign because the work was outsourced to the Party.

To be fair to YDA, this is not a usual conference to them. They’re acutely aware that there are less training sessions than normal, and it’s actually a strategic decision that has both an upside and a downside. The downside I’ve already described. The upside is that NHDP and the Stonewall Democrats, who also have a sizable contingent here and are co-sponsors, helped take care of a lot of logistics, and YDA gets to showcase their members and what they can do to a skeptical state party that still doesn’t look favorably on young voters. Joe Courtney spoke (on behalf of Dodd) during today’s luncheon, and he gave a rousing speech about the critical role that young voters – particularly at the University of Connecticut - played in giving him his 83 vote victory in the House of Representatives. That scored major points for YDA with the New Hampshire party, and hopefully they’ll start to rethink their relationship to young voters, and maybe even implement a youth strategy.

This was also a strategic choice in that YDA gave up an entire afternoon (during a tightly packed 48 hours) in which they are training their members on the organization's new field strategy. The leadership has created walk lists using the America Votes voter file information for voters under 32 in Manchester, New Hampshire, and teams of two and three are right now out canvassing and conducting a pub-crawl canvass to demonstrate the ABCs and value of non-traditional field techniques. The peer to peer field strategy (along with the way the organization allocates financial resources during election) were at the heart of the 2005 contested election, and the training is meant to not only show YDA leaders how to run a local canvass, but also the value in doing so. So today they're working to build both institutional knowledge, experience, and consensus. That seems like a worthwhile trade-off in the run-up to a Presidential election where YDA’s performance in the field will likely play a huge role in determining how well they are funded for the next 4 years.

That’s all for now. I’ve got to head back to the conference to listen in on the Canvass debrief. I’ll have one more dispatch from the YDA conference tomorrow.