Democrats' Vulnerabilities on Youth

I want to follow up Sarah's post with another to underscore something she wrote:

The moral of the story continues to be that young voters will turn out if they are graced with the same outreach as older voters. That is, if you want them to turn out. Progressive candidates can win if they work to engage young voters in their district that connect to progressive issues. As a partisan hack my advice to the other side is to be more conservative and embrace the teabaggers.

We know that if young people are contacted by another peer and asked to register to vote, they're more likely to vote. We know that young voters are courted through peer-to-peer outreach methods by some campaigns, and more likely than not, those campaigns demonstrate success in getting youth to the polls. We just saw a GOP candidate successfully do this in Virginia.

What really concerns me is that Sarah even had to offer her "advice" to Republicans (the Democrat in me echoes it) at the end of her post. Laugh all you want, but if the Republicans continue to operate from a McConnell mode, and the Democrats continue to field campaigns like Deeds and Corzine, with no peer-to-peer operation or youth issues, it's not going to be pretty.

Yes, the mid-terms are still a little over a year away, and these gubernatorial elections pale in comparison to the scale of the mid-terms, but they definitely should be viewed as a lesson. If we start to assume young people are blue when running campaigns, we'll be left seeing red.