A Thought on Investing in Movements vs. Elections

It's a traditional critique of progressive youth organizing that it's been a huge mistake of the left to make only cyclical investments around elections, rather than long-term investments in leadership building and capacity. For decades, the conservative youth movement has made those non-cyclical investments in organizations like Young America's Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and many more to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year. The results of these investments over the past 30 years has been the creation of a crop of leaders like Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Ralph Read and over 50,000 other activists who've run through the conservative leadership training pipeline.

Meanwhile, the left has made cyclical investments that spool up around elections, and we've also made a lot of investments in non-partisan GOTV and voter registration work. The upshot of this is that we've lacked a real leadership pipeline, but it's also meant that a lot of innovation has happened on the left around GOTV work, whereas the opposite is true in the conservative movement.

This is probably going to turn out to be a huge advantage for us in 2008. Young people are leaning heavily progressive and turning out in record numbers. This will only be helped along by a strong GOTV operation aimed at getting young people to the polls.

This isn't an argument in favor of cutting off the work that's been done investing in other areas. I still think that we need to build an infrastructure to match the conservative infrastructure, and if donors hadn't shaken off the cyclical mentality, we wouldn't have great new organizations like Campus Progress. Just saying that for once the old short-sightedness of the progressive movement builders might pay some dividends.