policy

So here's a question that I don't have an answer to, but I think is very important. Why aren't young voters and the many youth organizations that have sprouted in the last 5 years represented at the tables of the major progressive policy coalitions?

Earlier this week, a major new progressive policy coalition announced it's launch. Health Care For American Now (HCAN) is a coalition of over 100 progressive institutions dedicated to spending over $40 million this election cycle to promote guaranteed health care for all Americans. Looking over the list of participating organizations, only one - the League of Young Voters - is an organization representing the interests of young Americans. None of the 12 members of the steering committee are committed to representing the policy interests of young people. This, despite the fact that young people are the demographic most likely to lack health insurance.

This is clearly one of the next steps that we as progressive organizers need to take. We've made great strides in moving our generation to the polls and in altering the narrative around youth engagement (though there is still much work to be done along those lines). But even as youth orgs are creating an effective infrastructure for getting out the vote and building a new leadership pipeline, we're still not a major player the realm of progressive policy. We may be more effective and coherent as a movement, but we're still relegated to the "kids table."

If you look at the recent FISA fight, youth groups are also not one of the key players. With the exception of student loans and perhaps climate change activism, I can't think of any major progressive coalition in recent years that prominently included youth organizers in its leadership (please, correct me if I'm wrong) or as a key coalition member.

It's going to be very important that we change that - particularly in '09 and '10 when we'll have our biggest change to mold more progressive policy and legislation. We're getting really good at mobilizing our members and peers to vote. It's about time we demonstrate that we can mobilize them around an issue and get our rightful seat at the table.

Bumped from the user blogs. --Mike

Crossposted at the Great Orange Satan

Hey All. I'm a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institution this summer, and I have a question for you:

What are you up to this July 11th? Still recovering from crazy 4th of July parties? Feverishly packing for Netroots Nation? Trying to whip Democratic Senators into shape vis-a-vis FISA?

I have an idea that's way more fun.

That's right. Presenting - The Roosevelt Institution National Expo, Reclaiming the Stuff of Politics.

(If you're a young progressive) be there. Or be rectangular.

Friday July 11, 2008
AED Conference Center
1825 Connecticut Ave, NW, 8th floor
Washington D.C.

Appearing in Michigan today, Barack Obama unveiled his plan to increase college affordability:

College affordability: John McCain doesn’t have a real plan to put college within reach

When it comes to education, Senator McCain is out of touch with the needs of hardworking Americans. It’s not just that he doesn’t have a real plan to make college affordable; it’s that he’s voted time and time again to stop us from making college affordable. A couple of years ago, he even voted against funding for students so he could protect billions of dollars in corporate tax loopholes.

Barack Obama’s plan to make college affordable for every student:

Provide a $4,000 American Opportunity Tax Credit. This fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university. Recipients of the credit will be required to give back by serving their community for 100 hours a year, either during the school year or over the summer.

Eliminate Costly Bank Subsidies. Obama will save taxpayers billions by eliminating the more expensive private loan program that exists today, and directing that money into direct aid for students. A transition to the direct lending system will also ensure that access to federal financial aid isn’t disrupted future market turmoil.

Simplify the Application Process for Financial Aid. The current application for federal financial aid is longer and more involved than many federal tax return. Obama will simplify the financial aid process by eliminating the current form altogether. Instead, he’ll base aid on a much simpler but equally accurate formula, so that students can predict their eligibility well in advance. And families will be able to apply simply by checking a box on their tax form, eliminating the need for a separate application.

Create a Community College Partnership Program. This initiative will help community colleges analyze what skills are needed to prepare students to work in local industry, and rewarding success by providing grants to community colleges that graduate more students and increase the number of their students who transfer to four-year colleges.

Help Students Become Aware of College Readiness. Too many high school students discover they are unprepared for college when it’s already too late. Barack Obama will provide $25 million in matching funds annually to states that develop Early Assessment Programs that help inform students early what they’ll need to do to prepare for college.

It's common knowledge that Social Security is "the third rail" of politics, but this year it is doubly true for youth organizations. We're in the middle of what may be the most important election in our lifetime and Democrats stand a damn good chance of not only winning the Presidency, but of capturing sizable majorities in both chambers of congress that could virtually guarantee a progressive policy reformation not seen since the New Deal or the Great Society.

In election after election, young voters are choosing Democratic candidates over Republicans by large margins. On issue after issue, young voters hold progressive stands on how to solve the problems that affect our nation. Except on the issue of Social Security.

A recent report by the Center for American Progress and Demos found that 74% of Millennials are supportive of plans to privatize social security compared to 41% of adults over 60. That's the bad news. The good news is that this is less about their ideology than their particular stage of life. It's common for younger voters to feel less secure about social security (and their prospects for receiving it when they retire), and thus be open to more ideas as to how best we can "fix" the perceived problem.

Here's some more good news: according to that same report, compared with previous generations, Millennials are more open to the government spending money to stabilize social security. It's not that Millennials aren't progressive on Social Security - at this point they aren't anything except looking for an answer, and not even very hard at that. According to a February Rock the Vote poll (pdf), only 4% of Millennials rank Social Security as the most important issue that will determine how they cast their ballot.

Nevertheless, it is the one sole chink in the armor that conservatives can exploit if they want to make inroads among youth. John McCain is already out on the stump exploiting this, speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the issue of privatizing Social Security. You can bet that there will be even more attempts by Republicans to scare young voters about the program's long-term fiscal stability as we get closer to the election.

That's why it's really disheartening to see youth organizations like Mobilize.org, Rock the Vote, and the Roosevelt Institution engaging conservatives on the issue and providing ideological cover to conservative groups who want to privatize the social safety net that has served us so well for so long.

On Monday, June 16th, these and other youth organizers, along with a number of conservative and "nonpartisan" policy types, will convene in Washington for the Youth Entitlement Summit. The name alone - entitlement - should ring alarm bells as a conservative frame, as should the leading sponsor organization, Americans for Generational Equality (AGE) - a conservative outfit that has promotes "intergenerational strife" and argues for the privatization of social security. Founded in 1986, it closed up shop in 1990 only to reopen it's doors - and PR machine - in 2006.

The conference claims "non partisanship," and a spirited discussion of the issues, but if that is really true, why are there no progressive economic luminaries like Jared Bernstein addressing the attendees? Why is the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute nowhere to be seen in the list of partners? Instead, the agenda boasts scholars from the Brookings, Heritage and Hoover foundations and the panels all take on the frame of "X program in crisis." Hardly a fair and balanced representation of the issues.

We're on the verge of the first progressive majority in decades. Social Security's problems - to the extent that it has any - are minor at best and decades in the future. There is no rush to fix this "problem," and if we can all wait another 6 months, the solution we find is likely to be much better or all Americans. Collaborating with conservative idealogues, even sitting at the table with them at this point is pointless at best and damaging at worst -- to the coming electoral wave and Democratic support among young voters, and to setting the agenda when we have a Democratic government in 2009.

Youth organizers beware! Stay off the third rail of politics and don't play the conservative's game. We have nothing to gain by engaging them on this issue until AFTER the November election.

You may have heard last week that the unemployment rate for May increased to 5.5%, the largest jump in 22 years. Elaine Chao, the head of the Department of Labor, made a bold and ridiculous claim that the sharp jump was due to an unusually large number of graduates entering the job market:

Via Shame on Elaine:

U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao issued the following statement on the May employment situation report released today:

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate reflects the fact that unusually large numbers of students and graduates are entering the labor market.”

Aside from the fact that this was a highly foreseeable problem "18 years in the making," the argument doesn't really hold water. As Jared Bernstein notes:

Be forewarned, there are those that will try to dismiss May's unemployment spike, arguing that it was mostly driven by teens. That's wrong. The adult rate was up from 4.5% to 4.8%, also a big spike, and various older groups of workers took a hit too. For example, the jobless rate for women, 25-54, was up 0.4% almost as much as the overall rise.

But even if the unemployment spike were mostly among young people, why should we discount it? If they're flooding the summer job market and not finding jobs, that's a problem too.

Besides, isn't it Elaine and Bush's job to create a robust economy precisely so everyone - teens included - can find work?

While Elaine was yelling "get off my lawn" to all those pesky youth getting ready to vote her out of the job, Bob Herbert laid the smack down today in a column about the REAL problems with teen unemployment - the forgotten youth in inner cities and rural areas who aren't even counted in the unemployment numbers because they've been out of work for so long. I believe the appropriate governmental euphemism is "discouraged worker."

The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.

Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.
[...]
It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:

“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”

Ah the Bush economy at work. Yet another reason we need change in this country and young voters are going to be the ones pushing us there.

Last Friday I attended the Better Deal Conference, a gathering of young activists to discuss the creation of a new progressive economic policy that addresses the issues facing our nation and our generation.

As Tamara Drout, one of the conference organizers noted in an article in the American Prospect, young Americans today are the first generation that may actually end up with a lower standard of living than their parents. On average, we graduate college with $20k of debt and enter into an outsourced, service-industry dominated economy in which health care has been decoupled from employment. For those of us who don't make it into college, it is becoming near impossible to earn a middle class living with just a high school diploma.

The issue is timely, to say the least.

Andy Stern (SEIU) and Katrina Vanden Heuvel (The Nation) delivered the keynote addresses (morning and afternoon, respectively), and there were some truly informative panels including:

• Paycheck Politics - covering the quality of jobs available to young people in the New Economy
• Getting a Life - affordability barriers to the necessities of a middle class life
• Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Destiny - exploring the intersection of race and class among Millennials.
• I myself sat on a panel entitled "We're Broke and We Vote - about youth GOTV efforts and the economy as an election issue for Millennials.

I won't sum up all the panels. CSpan was filming live all day and you can watch each panel by clicking the links above, or by going here. There were a few big takeaways from the day that I would like to mention:

• There was a lot of talk about recognizing that class is what divides us even more than race - particularly as a movement. Issues like green jobs, which can lift up poor Latinos and African Americans in inner cities, or poor rural whites equally, can create new ties and partnerships between traditionally disparate groups.
• tThe conference was full of college students and recent grads. Young people's debt burden is "pricing them out' of the nonprofit sector and traditional organizing jobs within the movement, but there are a variety of more professional roles that attendees can aspire to that will allow them to do well by doing good. The movement needs lawyers, researchers, economists and more just as much as good organizers. There needs to be a broader understanding of how this work will happen and where we can all fit in.
• Most importantly (at least to me since it came up numerous times during the voting panel), we need to think more about what happens on November 5th. All of our energies seem focused on getting out the vote. This is a good - and as I've noted a very new - thing. But the off year of the cycle (2009) is a very big open question. How will we shift gears from GOTV to policy? How will we make sure that the candidate fulfills their promises to young voters and institutes a Better Deal for "Generation Debt?" I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's pretty clear that we're going to need to have a large conference of some kind in which the issue orgs and the GOTV orgs all get in the same room and work out some kind of plan.

On this last point, I thought that the big elephant in the room that no one was really talking about was the Obama campaign, particularly in light of the recent post by Matt Stoller outlining how Obama is short-circuiting the influence partisan, "outside organizations" on the process and is in a position to rewire the Democratic Party in his own image.

Sen. Obama probably has a bigger "youth" list than all the youth vote and youth policy organizations out there combined. What does he plan to do with it after election day - win or lose? How will he keep his Millennial Movement engaged in effective action beyond his election towards the accomplishment of real progressive policy goals? We have no idea because his campaign won't tell us.

Clearly we need to start planning for "Day One" ourselves, and judging by the energy in the room there are lots of people itching to get started. When that time comes, hopefully Sen. Obama will join us and won't let all that energy and potential activism go to waste once the campaign reaches its end.

One final thought. A few weeks ago I attended a similar conference by the Roosevelt Institution called A New New Deal (again, the economy is the # 1 issue for young voters and reestablishing the kind of social safety net that gave our parents and grandparents a leg up into the middle class weighs heavily on everyone's mind). Despite the similar topics, these were two very different conferences. Roosevelt's conference felt very much an insider event. A number of stars from the Democratic economic policy apparatus were in attendance and the audience was composed of as many policy wonks as young, aspiring policy wonks. It was a networking event for young people to climb into the circles of Democratic public policy. Yesterday's event was a much more hands-on, learning experience for young activists whose constituents face economic hardships. With a 1 hour "Roots Camp" at the end of the day, it was very much a pragmatic conference. I suspect that both are needed if we are to create a leadership pipeline for young policy types and create quality organizing campaigns around the issues. But it is worth noting the difference between the two.

Yesterday in USA Today, Republican operative David Frum published an Op-Ed acknowledging the Republican Party's huge loss of support from young voters, and outlining a four-point plan to recapture the youth vote and revive the days of Reagan and Bush Sr.

Frum gets a few things right. Millennials are the most anti-Republican age group in the electorate, that position is a response to the failures of the Bush Administration to adequately address any number of social, economic, and geopolitical problems, the dominance of Christian conservatives and their culture war values on choice and GLBT rights also plays a part, as does the fact that the Millennial generation is the most diverse, tolerant generation in history and the Republican Party is not at all diverse or tolerant.

But Frum is smoking something if he thinks his four-point plan can turn things around for the GOP.

Three of his proposals amount to nothing more than putting a kinder, gentler face on policies that a majority of youth roundly reject. I see little room for a pro-environment, pro-choice, multilateralist generation that believes in the power and obligation of government to protect and provide opportunity for its citizens to embrace a unilateral foreign policy, green washing environmental policy or a more compassionate anti-choice agenda.

But one recommendation sticks out among the rest and it deserves closer scrutiny.

Think Social Security taxes, not income taxes.

Today's young voters are paying much more in Social Security taxes than in income taxes — and contributing much more into Social Security than they will ever see out of it.

Republicans took a beating on the Social Security issue in 2005. But the issue is not going away. And Barack Obama's solution — taxing more income for Social Security — is neither workable nor popular. Personal accounts offer hope for personal wealth to a generation that is increasingly anxious about its economic future. With a relatively small subsidy — $300 per year for workers earning less than $40,000 — a revived Republican personal account plan could guarantee that every American worker would retire a millionaire, even if they never earn more in their lives than minimum wage.

Republicans will always face overwhelming disadvantages among blacks and Hispanics. President Bush's attempts to woo Hispanics via lax immigration policies disastrously backfired, alienating white Republicans without achieving gains among Hispanics.

But we can talk to young blacks and Hispanics as young people, who share economic interests with an entire generation of overtaxed young workers, regardless of race.

This is a common narrative heard not just among conservatives, who use it as their supposed "Ace in the hole" when talking to or about young voters, but also among progressives. During my book tour this question has come up a number of times. Yesterday at the Roosevelt Institution conference, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, the Executive Director of the Drum Major Institute, made reference to an alleged conservative view of Social Security reform among Millennials. I myself have fallen into the trap of believing that young people consider Social Security broken and privatization as the most viable option for "fixing" it.

After extensive conversations with some fellow youth leaders this morning, and a little bit of reading, I no longer believe that to be the case.

Back in 2005, the last time that this issue came up, Rock the Vote teamed up with the AARP to poll the electorate on the issue. Contrary to popular belief, they found that most young people did not support Social Security privatization if it entailed the dismantling of other parts of the social safety net:

Most Americans in the 18 to 39 age group, for example, say that they would flat-out oppose the accounts if, for example, it means that cuts to their guaranteed Social Security benefits would be so severe that they could not make up the difference with private accounts (70 percent say they would oppose) or that diverting some Social Security payroll taxes means "massive new federal debt in order to pay current benefits" (63 percent say they would oppose).

PEW found similar results at the time, and also noted that the more young people knew about the details of privatization, the less likely they were to support it.

A number of young activists wrote about the subject at the time. Dana Goldstein, then of Campus Progress, actually debated a pro-privatization student and found that the pro-privatization student group, Students for Saving Social Security, was little more than an astroturf group.

At the time, Matt Singer, now of Forward Montana, and Heather McGhee, who is now working on Demos's Better Deal Conference, also wrote critiques of the supposed youth support for social security privatization.

Lest you think that my outdated statistics from 2005 are no longer relevant, let's remember that in 2005, a number of Gen Xers were still in the 18 - 29 catagory (and they made up a majority of the 18 - 36 cohort). Gen Xers have consistently been far more conservative than Millennials. If anything, these numbers have likely seen a vast improvement. Again, Rock the Vote's poll data can provide some help here.

In February of 2008, Rock the Vote released a new poll of young voters (18 - 29) (pdf). When asked what their top concerns were for the country, only 2% responsed that Social Security was one of their largest concerns. 0% of African Americans agreed that Social Security was a major problem, and only 5% of Hispanics. Now granted, there are margin of error issues in these numbers, but the point is, the numbers are so small that it is hard to see how this could turn out to be the Republican's "Ace in the Hole" to win back young voters.

At best, what we have in Social Security is the one issue in which we may actually have to engage the Republicans in serious debate among young voters. But research shows that once young voters become educated as to the details, and the consequences, of privatization, they readily abandon the concept. Considering the conditions of the stock market recently, this is a debate I'm more than willing to have.

I'm not entirely sure what to write about the conference so far. Policy and issue work is not my usual bag, and this conference feels quite different from the kind I'm used to attending. There are congressmen here and non profit heads. Great activists like Deepak Barghava, and Democratic Names like Simon Rosenberg and Mike Lux are in attendance, as are the usual crazy progressives who bring all their personal baggage to these types of events and use their time at the mic to harangue the panelists. There are also a lot of really smart college and grad students asking complex questions about policy.

Superficially, I'm woefully underdressed (though that's not unusual at these things) and stick out like a sore thumb. More substantively, I just attended a panel on the New Deal called "The Intellectual Underpinning of a Renegotiated Social Contract," featuring the afformentioned Mike Lux, Simon Rosenberg, Deepak Barghava, and Tim Fertik, a Roosevelt Institution fellow. The content was interesting. Deepak noted that the incrementalist, technocratic progressive approach for last 40 years has failed against a values driven, movement and ideas approach of the conservatives, and any attempt to revitalize or create a New New Deal will have to reckon with both that failure as well as the structural racism that was embedded in our society in part by Roosevelt's programs.

Mike Lux made the point that, from a political perspective, reviving the "old" New Deal is not a good framework for achieving a "new" New Deal. Americans are looking to the future, according to Lux, and 2008 is a debate between future vs. the past. Likewise, our rhetoric must be about the future. Deepak's suggestion is that the idea of a shared fate and common destiny for all Americans might be the messaging Rosetta Stone to translate our policy priorities into reality.

These are all well and good (and necessary), and the Roosevelt Fellows that are sitting on panels alongside some of the bigger names in the progressive movement are more than keeping pace. But I can't help but feel a bizarre culture clash at this conference, and its about more than the fact that I'm in jeans while everyone else is in suits.

Most conferences I go to are very much geared towards action - winning elections, defeating conservatives, winning legislative battles, exchanging best practices. This is much more like an academic conference. Everyone is talking about policy, but it's not a vigorous debate. There will be no new policy working its way out of this conference. Rather, it's a gathering of the policy tribes in which everyone is affirming core progressive policy principles. It's a lecture and most people in the room already agree with the thesis.

I have very little understanding of how the progressive policy world works, as a hierarchy/career path to climb or as a machine whose goal is the creation and passage of policy. So I don't have a good idea as to how a conference like this fits into that machine.

With regard to the generational gap here, Margaret Simms, President of the National Academy of Social Insurance had something very informative to say earlier this morning. She said that achieving a New New Deal needs to be a generational partnership, and we cannot pursue a course that set the generations at odds with each other. At the very least, this conference does seem to be a networking opportunity to forge those bonds between the older and younger generations of progressive policy types. That alone is probably worthwhile.

There's a lot of focus right now on the upcoming election - as their should be. But it's important to remember that elections aren't ends in themselves. They are vehicles the people use to usher in policy changes.

When Rock the Vote released their poll of Millennials (ppt) a few weeks ago, topping the list of concerns was the economy. Specifically, young people were concerned about their ability to obtain jobs that would allow them to climb out of debt and begin to build a life, whether that be supporting a child or buying a house (or both). This is the number one concern of Millennials, who on average graduate with $20k of debt and may be the first American generation to not do better financially than their parents.

What are the policies that could change this situation and provide economic security to our generation? These are the questions that Demos hopes to answer at their upcoming conference: A Better Deal - Reclaiming Economic Security for a New Generation.

The conference, scheduled for May 8th and 9th in DC, will feature an impressive array of speakers including Katrina vanden Heuval of The Nation, Andy Stern, President of SEIU, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, ED of the Drum Major Institute, as well as a number of youth organizing leaders. Panels include:

User-Generated Breakout Sessions
Registrants will have a chance to submit requests for topics or proposals to host a session during online registration. At the conference, these small group discussions or training sessions will allow participants to learn from each other and connect with other activists in their region or issue area.

Paycheck Politics
This panel will focus on the quality of jobs available to young adults in the New Economy, comparing wages, job security, unionization and benefits to the jobs that sustained previous generations. Speakers will also offer strategies for improving job quality, including living wage laws, career ladder and green job programs, traditional unionization and alternative organizing strategies including worker centers.

Higher and Higher Education
This panel will focus on issues of higher education access, affordability and debt. In this generation, the college degree is what the high school diploma was in the previous generation: an entry requirement for middle-class jobs. The panel will explore the attack on affirmative action amidst the widening racial gap in higher education, the drivers behind skyrocketing tuitions and student debt, and offer policy solutions.

Getting a Life: Housing, Health Care and Child Care
This panel will focus on affordability barriers to the necessities of middle-class life: housing, health care and child care. Panelists will describe why and how costs have risen, what public policies could help young adults and families, and how activists can play a role.

Generation Debt
This panel will focus on the rise of personal debt among young adults, explaining how culture, financial pressures and new lending industry practices have played a role. Panelists will discuss strategies to combat payday lending, abusive credit card practices, predatory home loans and other high-cost credit.

Young Elected Officials
This panel will showcase a group of young elected officials who have made the economic concerns of young adults and families central to their campaigns and agendas.

Race, Ethnicity and Economic Destiny
This panel will explore the connection between the millennial generation's two claims to fame: the most diverse generation in American history and the first that is widely predicted to not surpass their parents' standards of living. Panelists will discuss the economic status of immigrants and their children; the effect of the racial wealth gap; the economic contours of mass youth incarceration, and issues of political power and the challenges of winning broad government investments in a more diverse population.

We're Broke and We Vote
This panel will focus on strategies to build a movement for a better deal for young adults. Panelists will discuss the power of young voters, the obstacles to moving a young adult economic agenda and how to mobilize young adults around these issues.

Many of the topics that will be covered at the conference were written about in a recent special report by The American Prospect: Mobilizing Millennials. I highly recommend both the conference and the report for those looking to understand the economic concerns of young voters, and the policies young people will ask the next administration to implement.

I'll be at the conference live-blogging, as well as speaking on a panel. Hope to see you there.

I'm about to get on a plane (again, sigh). Here are some must-read stories around the tubes today:

• Anya Kamenetz pulls together a lot of recent data about young voters and takes a stab at outlining a youth policy agenda.
• The New York Times looks at a PEW survey from December and wakes up to the fact that young people get their political news through social networks on the web - aka digital word-of-mouth:
  

  According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

  ....

  In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth. Jane Buckingham, the founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, said the “social media generation” was comfortable being in constant communication with others, so recommendations from friends or text messages from a campaign — information that is shared, but not sought — were perceived as natural.

• Davey D. posted an article suggesting that young black voters are bucking the generational trend and becoming more independent and less Democratic in their party loyalties. This seems to be caught up in the rather complex dynamics of the historical role of African Americans in supporting the Democratic Party, and current divisions between the hip hop generation and the civil rights generation.
• In other news, Chelsea Clinton plans on attending the Young Democrats of North Carolina State Convention, and Rock the Vote lets us know about a bill now before Congress which would allow all 17 year olds the right to vote in local, state, and presidential primaries if they turn 18 before the general election.