2006 Election

Crossposted at Young Philly Politics

Once I knew that I would be doing outreach at concerts and on campus i started to pull together the materials that I would use to help with outreach and persuasion. When I first talked to Ray and Jen I had an idea of what types of materials would work in the environments that I'd find myself and towards the youth demographic that I was targeting. The main thing that I wanted was to make a series of youth oriented issue cards, similar to Music for America's issue cards (see below for some examples). These cards would have been co-branded between Philadelphians Against Santorum (PAS) and a few of organizations that we were either partnering with or that we felt exemplified the Left's stance on one or another issue. The idea would have been to have a series of cards that provided talking points for our volunteers, educated the people who read them, and gave a sense of the broad coalition that makes up the Left.

But once I got the job (in mid-September) and started to take a cold hard look at the calender, I realized that there was simply no time to create a series of my own materials, that I would have had to come up with the text and, given PAS' limited budget, either design them myself or find a designer that would do the work both quickly and cheaply/for free. And so, with only a month left to register people in PA, I decided to improvise, and I began to scrounge together whatever materials that I could from friends and allies around the state and nation to supplement the field materials that PAS had developed.  This post is a look at the materials that I ended up using at Concerts and on Campus during the 2006 Senate Race in PA.

As I noted, we mainly turned, to organizations that we were allied with, or whom I knew personally, to come up with materials. That said, these are the things that I was looking for as I pulled together my field materials:

• Variety - As I noted above, I wanted the materials I used to give an idea of the broad spectrum of issues that liberals/progressives/Democrats stand for & I also wanted to make sure that we had a diverse enough set of issue based materials so that people whom we talked with could "self select" the issues that we talked to them about.
• Design - Very often I find that left leaning political people have little to no understanding of communications design (I definitely am), but it is not hard to see the effects that well produced literature has (makes it more attractive, makes it simpler, makes it more professional, etc). Music for America's materials are always well designed and attractive, but the Partisan Project posters (see below) were probably the simplest, and most effective communications tool that I had in my "field chest" in 2006, and they will be the #1 thing I will use in 2008!
• Content - As the cards served as both talking points and as communicative tools, we needed to be clearly written & talk about what progressives/liberals/Democrats stand for while keeping the information as compact and to the point as possible.
• Appeal - Young people like posters, buttons, and stickers, and as such I sought these out the most (these were, by far, the main items that we gave away at shows and on campus).  The more attractive the materials, the easier it is to attract people to us (instead of going up to people's doors, or even tapping them on their shoulder at a show), which generally makes people much more receptive to our spiel(s), which makes us much more effective. And when you give people something that they want for free, they are much more likely to be receptive to what you have to say.

In the end we only used materials from a few organizations besides our own. Here's a look at what we used:

Crossposted at Young Philly Politics

As I noted in my first post-mortem piece, my plan for getting "the kids" to the polls centered around work at concerts and on campus. In my second in a series of post-mortem pieces I'll look specifically at the concerts we worked, including an introduction to Sean Agnew and R5 Productions, who made this work possible, and helped ensure it was a success.

Sean Agnew & R5 Productions

As you know by now, much of my outreach centered around working at concerts thrown by Philly's #1 independent promotions company- Sean Agnew's R5 Productions. Now, for those who don't know, or at least know of, Sean, he is, to use the scientific term, "The Man".  Sean has single-handedly kept the Philadelphia independent music scene fresh and available to kids of all ages, while going up against the two horrendous monopolies that dominate American concerts and events: Clear Channel (whose concert division has recently been "spun off" into Live Nation) & Ticketmaster. If you want an idea about what Sean does, and who he has to go up against, check out this Harper's Magazine cover story that looks at Sean and his much larger competitors, or just head to the First Unitarian Church (22nd and Chestnut), the Starlight Ballroom (9th & Spring Garden), or Johnny Brenda's (Girard & Fairmount) and check out one of the extremely well attended and almost always entertaining shows that R5 throws! He also recently had a stalker blog dedicated to spotting him, which I'm just assuming means that he is hot shit, and he shares Ed Rendell's love for politics and the Eagles (though I don't think he share's Ed's love affair with fast/junk food or yelling at little league umpires- which is my earliest memory of the Gov). And while Sean is definitely not the type of guy who most people would think of as political, and definitely not someone who politicians might look to for help and or advice, he is very passionate about politics and is exactly the type of cultural community leader whom democrats should be looking to work with. Here's Sean's current myspace picture:

Sean & Ed Agree! The Eagles should be 8-1!!!

I met Sean during the Presidential campaign of 2004, which you can read about in my thesis section Culture in Need of a Home, an Idea is Born, if you are so inclined. And, as some of you may know, I have been working with Sean since 2005 to try and build a permanent space for R5 which can support sustainable political activism and provide a home/working space for political, cultural, and civic non-profits (maybe some for-profits as well). The project was called 8th Street, but that location, which as you might guess is on 8th Street, is no longer a possibility for us and so if/when we get started we'll have to choose a new name. But at anyrate, as the summer months slipped by, and as it became apparent that I was not going to be able to get everything together before the election, I decided that I would try and make the political side of the project happen, which, as I noted in my first piece, Ray & Jen helped make it into a reality.

What I didn't mention fully in my first piece is why culturally bound political activism is so important, especially when it comes to youth outreach and engagement. If you're interested you can read a letter that I helped to write that explains why it is so important to bring together politics and culture under a single roof here: Keys to a Future Majority: Building a Model for Sustainable Progressive Activism. My colleague Mike Connery has also written some great pieces on this connection, the best of which is his two part Living Liberally: Reforming Democratic "Youth" Programs (part 2 is here).

This is what the future majority looks like. A small part of the crowd at an R5 Productions Concert at the Starlight Ballroom.

Connecting culture and politics is important for a few reasons.

Crossposted at Young Philly Politics

A couple of months back I mentioned that I had proposed and accepted a job doing political outreach and organizing with Philadelphians Against Santorum (PAS). Since then I have been completely overwhelmed with the work at hand and a big move back to Philly (I lived in Brooklyn for the past 8 years with my wife), so I wasn't able to write as much as I would have liked to (and lord knows I love to self-promote!). But now that things have come to an end (and what a sweet, sweet ending it was!) I wanted to tell you a bit about the program I ran through PAS, and give you some of my thoughts and experiences from this election cycle. Since I am still working to get my life back to a sense of normality, I still don't have a ton of time, so I am going to keep this post short, and expand on it over the next few days.

How it all started...
This past summer I worked for the amazing documentary The War Tapes, doing outreach to the netroots, web support, and bit of event planning. As the theatrical release was coming to an end, sometime late in the summer, I looked around at the lack of political groups working in Philly and I started to get really nervous that the left was once again poised to snatch defeat from the arms of victory. I only knew of one group- Philadelphians Against Santorum- that was doing any sort of field work in the city, and as far as I could tell there weren't any groups at all doing youth outreach, which really shocked me given the fact that Kerry owed his victory in PA during the 2004 Presidential Elections to the 2-1 advantage he received from people under 25 (every age group over 25 voted for Bush by a small margin). At around the same time I noticed that PAS was hiring for field organizers, and I shot PAS founder/Director Ray Murphy an e-mail to tell him that I was interested in working with/for them.

A week later I met with Ray and PAS' Assistant Director Jen Murphy (not related to each other or to Congressional candidate Lois or Congressional-elect Patrick) and listened to what they were trying to accomplish and how they thought that they could do so. Basically, Ray's plan was to knock on the doors of new and infrequent voters, call them on the phone, and make sure that they got their asses to the polls on election day (I'll let Ray explain it better, or check out some of the great press pieces that PAS received). The plan sounded good, but I knew where I could have the most effect, both in terms of this election and for builaing the Future Majority that we will need to fix the multitude of problems our generation faces (or will face in the near future) and it wasn't on some stranger's doorstep. What I proposed to Ray was to implement the political side of a project that I have been working on for over a year now (and which I continue to try and make into a reality), which is an adaptation of the model that Music for America uses to bring young people (like yours truly) into the network enabled left-leaning movement. Basically, I proposed that I work at every concert thrown by Philly's independent show promotion king-- Sean Agnew and his company R5 Productions-- as well as on campus, to register as many millenials as possible and persuade them to vote and vote Democratic through face-to-face encounters in spaces where they feel comfortable and at home.

Youth Outreach & Building a Future Majority
I could write an entire Masters Thesis on why focusing on young voters is paramount to any movement that strives for long-term success, why face-to-face interactions with a peer are extremely important to accomplish this, and why the connections between culture and politics need to be pointed out to young people, but as I said, I'm a bit short of time at the moment. Okay, that's a bit of a bad joke (if it wasn't for bad jokes, I wouldn't be able to tell any at all). I wrote my Master's Thesis on this exact subject (titled Keys to a Future Majority), which you can find here on Future Majority. Here are a few of the relevant sections that led me to believe that youth outreach was the most important activity that progressives could engage in:

When I started to work on the 8th Street project, one of my main goals was to have an impact in the 2006 elections in PA. But, things have (predictably) taken much longer than I had hoped, and I started to worry that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to influence this extraordinarily important election (Operation Iranian Freedom, anyone?).

This worry turned to downright despair as I waited, and waited for some group or another to do a big push amongst the “millennials”, a.k.a. the under-30 set, for this election. After all, the future of our nation is at stake and our generation is slipping further and further behind in our quest for the American Dream (which has now apparently been revised to- “Well, maybe I can actually get and education. And when I graduate with massive debt, maybe I can find a job that can pay me enough to pay for my school debt- what should me called the millennial mortgage. Then, if I’m really lucky, maybe I can get health care and not go bankrupt by the age of 35). But as of last month, no groups had stepped forward to take on this monumental task, and I started to believe that we were doomed to fail.

Well, a few weeks ago I noticed that a group headed by someone I know was hiring in PA. The group this person heads is trying to turn out “new and infrequent” voters in Philly, and they were looking for some field staff. I asked to meet with them, listened to what they were trying to do, and then proposed what I though I could do to best ensure that we are not doomed to 6 more years of Man-On-Dog, Forrest Gump with an attitude, Bush’s favorite rubber stamp, or whatever you want to call that sorry excuse for a human being.

Basically, my idea was to start the political side of 8th Street, even though we still lack a home, meaning we will do outreach and registration at all of R5 Productions shows between Friday and election day. But, we will also be doing a lot of outreach on campuses, at coffee shops, and anywhere else where young people congregate. I also hope to have a few events before October 5th (the registration deadline) to try and get as many kids registered as possible.

My hope is that we can both make an impact and prove some of the concepts that have been written about in my thesis and on this site. But- it is going to be one hell of a job. Almost all of the groups who did work in Philly during last years’ election are either MIA or actively strip-mining the grassroots, as Greg put it. Many kids have already been registered, and many will only need to be reminded that an election is coming up and told where they should vote to increase turnout. But, either way, making an impact on the election is going to be a daunting task, one that I am looking forward to taking on.

Of course, I can use a lot of help. If you can volunteer or donate (time, money, skills) please let me know. If you know researchers looking to study the efficacy of various strategies, let me know. If you know any bands or famous people who can draw crowds of young people, and who hate the direction our nation has gone, let me know.

For a list of shows you can volunteer at check out R5 Production's show page. I'll have a volunteer page up shortly, but for now if you see any that you like, please e-mail me using the Future Majority contact page.

The election is only a few months away, and I am finally getting back to the work that I love. But- we all need to pull together to pull out a victory, no matter what the polling might say.

Whose ready to help make some shit happen?