Youth Outreach

After a year of the likes of MTV's Street Team, Rock the Vote's Rock the Trail, and others harnessing the power of youth reporting on youth, Kids network Nickelodeon has decided to also get into the politics game for some of the younger members of the youth movement who are at the tail end of the Millennial Generation.

Reporters Lily Collins (daughter of singer Phill Collins) and J.J. will be the reporters on the scene at the Presidential Inauguration to report from their perspective.

According to the AP

"Throughout the presidential campaign, Nickelodeon found that interest among its young viewers matched that of the adults. Nick's own online "election" had 2.2 million children voting, with kids supporting Obama over John McCain (51 percent to 49 percent) in a closer margin than the real election.

"We decided to carry it through so that kids would have the full experience of the presidential election," said Marva Smalls, executive vice president of public affairs at Nickelodeon.

The coverage will show up during commercial breaks and, most prominently, during the periods between regular shows in prime-time. Nick will offer a retrospective of past presidents taking the oath of office and interviews with young people about Obama's election and his inaugural address."

The piece goes on to say that because the Obama children are within the Nick demographic the network believes it is a major reason viewers connect with the new First Family so well.

Like others, Nick covered the primaries in some way as well as the conventions and election night, but this seems to be a much more detailed coverage of the events.

Nickelodeon first began to dive into the youth news with Nick News, a series hosted by Linda Ellerbee in 1992 and has consistently brought both global and domestic issues to young viewers and covered them in a way youth can both understand and relate to.

Its always great to see other young reporters who bring youth the news, I hope Nick News covers the youth movement moving forward and the impact those formerly in their demographic then grow into some of the best movers and shakers of our generation.

We know that youth turnout is very difficult to actually count because so many states (I'm talking about you Kansas and Oklahoma) don't parse data based on little things like age or gender or any identifying information other than who voted for which candidate. I guess we should be grateful, right?

Sadly, we have to use exit polling to understand how these young people voted in so many states. Exit polling is traditionally unreliable because they disproportionately survey older voters and as we know young voters are difficult to both find and contact (what with that darn modern technology and all...).

Battleground states have more accurate data because everyone needs to know every little tiny vote. Also states with more sophisticated election boards or Secretaries of State tend to have data available for people like us who want to take a closer look without having to deal with a partisan infrastructure for data. Not very independent...

What I've been looking at this week is comparing states that have active youth outreach vs. states that don't and how the turnout differed.

Montana has had Forward Montana working on the ground since before the 2006 election. They are active every month of every year, not just in the lead up to an election.

This year Montana had a 22% turnout in the exits that went for Obama 61/37. In 2004 it was 21% of the vote share but they went for Bush 52/43.

New Mexico which just recently had a youth org start up and rocked it this year. According to Karlo at CIRCLE

"New Mexico's youth turnout rate is consistently below the national average despite a large increase in turnout from 2000 to 2004. Like Indiana, young New Mexicans preferred Bush over Kerry."

But in the exits (which... again give a very conservative estimate of youth turnout) 71% of 18-29 year olds went for Obama in New Mexico. Contrast that with 17% share in 2004 that went for Bush 50/49. That is a substantial difference.

According to CIRCLE’s estimation

"using aggregated counts of votes from each of these states ... (including NM), youth turnout in the heavily campaigned states was especially strong at 59%, compared with 47% for all other states combined."

Kansas ... bless their hearts... have no youth outreach at all. But this year had a very strong Students for Barack Obama chapter at the University of Kansas and a few other areas of the state. They had a dramatic change of heart since 2004.

Kansas had exits showing 51/47 for Obama with also a 19% share. 2004 Exits show a 17% share with 55/44 for Bush over Kerry. That is a 7% change of heart for a party and a 2% increase in share. And that's a conservative estimation...

Oklahoma, by contrast, had no outreach to young voters outside of traditional Young Democrats chapters. Oklahoma was the only state in the country to have more young voters vote republican in their Primaries than democrats.

Exits show that in 2008 - 60% of 18-29 year olds went for McCain in Oklahoma and there was no increase in the share from 2004 to 2008. In 2004, however, they went 62% for Bush over Kerry... so there IS that.

My guess, is that the dramatic turnout we've seen nationally only calculated to a 2% increase in youth enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 than for Kerry in 2004. That's also with a very competitive US Senate race where the democrat was a Young Elected Official.

I've said it before, I'll say it again... if you build it... they will come. We have 4 examples of all kinds of youth outreach here. 2+ year plan, 1-2 year plan, electoral only college outreach, and no outreach with results that show the results. In Montana and New Mexico they nearly flip-flopped in GOP to Democratic support - and in Kansas there was a 7% increase in democratic participation. Oklahoma saw.... nothing.

If we begin to not merely develop a 50 state strategy but develop a 50 state youth strategy then I think we can start to see the kinds of results coming out of Montana and New Mexico in states even like Kansas and Oklahoma.

Update: Kos just posted an example of the political deafness and blindness I just described below from a 2006 Peggy Noonan column.

Excerpt:

Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

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As if 2006 and 2008 weren't humiliating enough for the Grand Old Party, they're trying their best to get to a whole new kind of embarrassment come 2010/2012.

Obviously blind and deaf to the current political environment and demographics, we see the Republicans taking steps backward to accommodate the political views of its ever-shrinking base. John Boehner sounds a lot like Herbert Hoover:

“If we’re really serious about creating jobs, what we ought to do is we ought to eliminate the capital-gains tax,” Boehner said on Fox. “Why not lower capital gains taxes for -- and corporate income taxes for corporations in America to help keep jobs here?”

And then we get word that South Carolina Republican chair, Katon Dawson, is running for chairman of the Republican National Committee. Yes, that whites-only club member Katon Dawson, who didn't decide until September, when he realized he wanted to run for RNC chair, that he'd get rid of his racist ties.

Katon Dawson, the South Carolina GOP chairman, announced his candidacy for RNC chair yesterday.

And guess what: Back in September, when Dawson was first quietly laying the groundwork for his RNC run, The State newspaper reported that he resigned his membership in the nearly 80-year-old Forest Lake Club. Members told the newspaper at the time that the club's deed has a whites-only restriction and has no black members.

[...]

What's more, The State said that Dawson resigned the club after it became known that the paper was getting ready to report his membership.

So here we are, almost four weeks after Election Day, and the GOP continues to ignore the warning signs.

1. Like similar reports, a report from the Center for American Progress released a few weeks ago finds that Millennials (18-29 year old voters in the 2008 election) overwhelmingly saw government as the chief problem-solver.

   

2. From the Generation We and 2008 report discussed in Mike's post last week, Millennials are more concerned that the wealthiest in society and corporations will get too many tax breaks than be taxed too much.
   

   Millennials showed less tax sensitivity than voters as a whole in terms of moves to increase economic performance and fairness. For example, respondents were given the choice “I'm more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy. OR I'm more worried that we will go too far in increasing government spending and will end up raising taxes to pay for it”. Millennials chose the first over the second statement by 67-33, while voters overall were split down the middle 48-49. Similarly, the following choice was posed about corporate tax breaks: “I'm more worried that we will give more tax breaks to the rich and corporations. OR I'm more worried that we will go too far taxing the rich and corporations”. Millennials favored the first statement over the second by 74-26, compared to 61-34 among all voters.

   A related economic policy choice was the following: “When I voted, I was more concerned that Obama will raise taxes and increase government spending. OR When I voted, I was more concerned that McCain will continue the economic policies that have cost us jobs and caused higher prices”. By 57-33, Millennials were more concerned about McCain’s policies causing job loss and price hikes than about Obama’s policies causing tax hikes and spending increases. But among voters as a whole, this choice
   elicited a very close 49-45 split.

3. The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation report notes that Millennials are the most diverse generation in America's history, believing that race shouldn't limit relationships with other human beings, romantic or otherwise.
   

   According to March, 2006 Census data, about 62 percent of Millennial adults are non-Hispanic white, 18 percent are Hispanic, 14 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian. Reflecting this diversity and a generational proclivity toward seeing race as “no big deal,” Millennial attitudes on race are extremely progressive. According to the Pew Gen Next study, in 2003, almost all (89 percent) of white 18-25 year old Millennials said they agreed that “it’s all right for blacks and whites to date each other,” including 64 percent who “completely” agreed. Back in 1987-88, when the same question was posed to white 18-25 year old Gen Xers, just 56 percent agreed with this statement. Data from a 2005 Gallup poll underscore these findings; 95 percent of 18-29 year olds said they approve of blacks and whites dating and 60 percent of this age group said they had dated someone of a different race. In addition, 82 percent of white 18-25 year old Millennials in 2003 disagreed with the idea that they “don’t have much in common with people of other races.”

Young voters want the country to go in one direction, and the GOP, in these two examples, are apparently going to go the other way.

While this GOP stubbornness is certainly good news for the Democratic Party (provided we keep improving our youth outreach efforts), it's sad for the country. In order for youth to be healthily engaged in politics, both parties need to hold up their end of the bargain.

In an interesting development, one of the only four losing democratic incumbent congressional races in the country is speaking out. Second Congressional District Rep. Nancy Boyda's campaign manager Chad Manspeaker has posted a blog on the Kansas blog Everyday Citizen calling for a greater need for youth outreach and leadership development for youth in the state.

After a tough year in Kansas that made only a net gain of one state house seat and lost a US Congressional seat, democrats in Kansas are bitter sweet. Inspiration for hometown favorite Barack Obama came out in force with a gain of 4% over Kerry's loss in Kansas in 2004. Obama also garnered a 65,000 vote gain since 2004. Yet even with those benefits, Kansas was unable to create any local benefits for itself.

This morning's Topeka Capitol Journal says democrats in the state have no bench of candidates ready to step up and run for any statewide seats much less to seriously oppose the now 3 members of Congress in Kansas.

Manspeaker acknowledges his loss in his blog and the further loss of the state, but calls on Kansas Democrats to instead re-invent their party as a tech savvy grassroots movement much like what the Obama campaign did that does youth outreach and develops young leaders presumably to become candidates in the future.

More than anything, I learned from this campaign that grassroots organizing really does get the job done and new technologies like social networking tools are presenting themselves to make organizing forward even more efficient and effective.

If we are going to change Kansas politics, we must start from the bottom up, not from the top down. Utilizing social networks to build our ground forces and recruit new people will put us in a position to go after local races, could you imagine a city council race with social networking? But we can't stop there. We must build a structure that is more vast than the small races and act as a support mechanism for every race. We must build leadership within our state and retain those young leaders and fostering their enthusiasm. We must be a presence not merely for those who voted Tuesday, but those who will cast ballots in the years to come.

This campaign taught me that if someone has never been forced to run a campaign, no one will know who they really are. It is our job in the coming days, weeks, and months to change the rules and fight to expose people for who they are and what is really behind them. "The true test of our strength is how we rise to master challenges like these when they do arrive."

Emphasis mine.

Your Sunday reading. Enjoy!

• All those new Democratic voters are emerging as a huge force for Obama everywhere, especially in Pennsylvania.
• Time's "battleground" profile on the race in Virginia.
• Video of a great interview between Luke Russert and Barack Obama on young people. This was a long time ago politically -- Luke asks Obama about the "lipstick" comments:

• Although they're too young to vote, they're not too young to be politically involved.
• Ari Melber looks at the ground-breaking Obama GOTV operation.
• Talk about a generational divide brewing: a first grade class surprises their lesbian teacher by throwing rose petals at her San Francisco City Hall wedding ceremony.
• An article at the Personal Democracy Forum looks at the renovation of change.org and what it can become.
• Obama signs at Quantico -- one of the largest military bases in America?? Sounds like change to me!
• The Houston Chronicle has a write-up confirming what we already know: college students have to scale a plethora of obstacles in order to actually vote.

Saturday evening reading:

• As we're moving closer and closer to Election Day -- one month from today! -- make sure to go over to the website for the November Fifth Coalition. Here is an excerpt from the front page of their site that explains their objectives:
  

  The November 5th Coalition is an all-partisan alliance committed to civic partnerships that address our biggest challenges. The Coalition is named for the day after the election in 2008 when a new chapter of America's civic history begins. Wherever the people gather they should be able to ask candidates “November 5th questions” about how they plan to tap the talents of the whole society, instead of posing as superheroes who will solve our problems for us. We will also develop leadership networks and civic policies that can serve as resources for a new administration. We encourage our fellow citizens to join with us in calling on candidates to rise above excessively divisive partisanship and to promote the common good.

• The Personal Democracy Forum has the top five reasons you won't be able to vote.
• Gizmodo takes you on a tour of the new Obama iPhone application. Very impressive! You can download it here.
• More scare tactics from the Republicans, this time aimed at Montana voters. Alternet has the details.
• Young Nevadans are overwhelmingly registering as Democrats:
  

  In the 18 to 24 age group, for example, Democrats have 54,192 registered voters compared with 31,405 Republicans, or 45 percent of the total registered voters for Democrats versus 26 percent for Republicans. That's a 19 percentage point difference.

• More youth attempting to be politically engaged. More youth being told not to. This time in Texas.
• Prop 8, the evangelical-led effort to amend California's constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, has gradually grown less and less popular; this Washington Post article explains that young voters are the main reason for the decline in popularity.

Unbelievable.

The University of Illinois is grappling with the effects of a state law passed five years ago that was designed to keep state employees from campaigning for candidates on state time. In doing so, they have created quite an uproar among faculty and staff.

The university's administration has sparked outrage by telling faculty, staff and graduate students that a 5-year-old state law designed to prevent state workers from campaigning for candidates on state time or with state resources meant they could not express support for candidates or parties through pins, T-shirts or bumper stickers while on campus. Nor could they attend any political rally or event on campus, the administration said.

"They're trying to control our bodies and our voices any time we're on campus. These policies are clearly a violation of our 1st Amendment rights," said Dan Colson, an English graduate student who, along with other students, professors and free-speech experts, has lashed out.

Colson and others argue the University of Illinois was unfairly expanding state law and that academic freedom meant campus communities should not be held to the same standards as other state employees.

Unfortunately for Colson and civic-minded Americans across the state, the state took things a bit further.

But the governor's Office of Executive Inspector General, which investigates ethical violations, said it would act on complaints of political activity on college campuses depending on their severity.

And it delivered a sweeping twist, saying the state law meant that university students, not just employees, were prohibited from participating in political rallies on campus—an assertion at odds with the University of Illinois' interpretation of the law.

"Anything that benefits a political campaign is prohibited on state property," said Gilbert Jimenez, deputy inspector general. The results of any investigations of campus activity would be turned over the university's board of trustees with recommendations for discipline, including possible dismissal, Jimenez said.

Is Mr. Jimenez serious? Any activity on a college campus -- including that activity led by students -- is prohibited?

A trip to the University of Illinois website after reading about this has left me puzzled. This is from their "institutional commitment" to public engagement page:

"The term "public engagement" reflects the reality that so much of what we do takes the form of faculty members collaborating with communities, agencies, and organizations to address critical issues..." Chancellor Richard Herman, September, 2004

Chancellor Herman said this, wrote this, whatever, and then set up a task force studying civic engagement activities on campus. An excerpt from a university press release:

Chancellor Richard Herman appointed the task force in January and asked it to create a sharpened and sustained curricular and co-curricular emphasis on advancing the public good. The 26-member group, which includes representatives from campus units ranging from the department of architecture to WILL-AM/FM/TV as well as the University YMCA and Urban League of Champaign County, plans to strengthen connections between the campus and its communities, from the local to the global levels.

The effort is part of Herman’s Strategic Plan for the Urbana campus, an initiative to “establish Illinois as the leading public research institution that engages students in civic commitment and community-based learning experiences,” to help students meet the challenges of modern citizenship and address the most pressing societal problems.

The task force is leading a campuswide effort to identify the many existing dimensions of civic engagement, to help define it for the Urbana campus, encourage innovative thinking about it and make civic commitment more prominent in campus life and the identity of the institution.

So fine, the U of I is committed to civic engagement, or at least trying to find out what it means to them. But it's no wonder that only 16% of Millennials know what "civic engagement" means when they're getting mixed messages like this. U of I wants to "[engage] students in civic commitment," but its students aren't allowed to practice politics at its most fundamental level? In his article "Putting Politics Back Into Civic Engagement," in the Campus Compact Reader (Special Ed. 2003), Harry Boyte, the co-director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs's Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota, hits the nail on the head: "We need to put politics back into civic engagement in higher education if we are to open up and democratize the ways in which knowledge is produced, diffused, and adopted. This is key to democratic change of every kind in the 21st Century."

Boyte, of course, is right. Higher education and civic engagement are and should always be closely linked. But let's remember that the scapegoat here should be the state of Illinois. The policy currently on the books is no doubt faulty enough to warrant a revision. Fine, perhaps the intent of the policy -- to keep state employees from participating in political activity on state time while working -- is logical. But when a professor or staff member, not working and on their own time, walks across campus and is not allowed to voice his opinion on political issues, that not only proves that the law is too broad; it becomes unamerican. Mr. Jimenez, the deputy inspector general, is apparently victim to a civics-deprived education. The law clearly has First Amendment issues on its own, but then Mr. Jimenez comes along and broadens the scope -- students are not even allowed to express their beliefs.

This law absolutely needs to be changed. We don't need students coming from Illinois who are as civically ignorant as Mr. Jimenez and its state legislature.

And I'm hoping U of I proves the words on their website aren't merely there to keep up with other institutions who are committed to civic engagement. It can do this by aggressively lobbying for a revision of the law.

Here's another write-up at The Chronicle of Higher Education in case you're interested.

Rock the "tween" vote.

This year, in an effort to mobilize voters in this historic presidential election, Usher launched the "I Can't But You Can" voter registration campaign geared towards youth ages 17 and under. This nationwide campaign began this summer in Atlanta with 350 youth registering nearly 1,000 new voters. The Campaign will be expanded to 8 cities simultaneously on September 27th and is projected to educate more than 4,000 youth and register 17,000 new voters nationally.

In conjunction with ServiceNation's Day of Action ( www.servicenation.org), the "I Can't But You Can" Campaign will host voter registration rallies and drives in cities across the US on September 27th. Participating cities include: Atlanta, Boston, Kansas City (KS), Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, New Orleans and Oakland. At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the USC Marching Band will perform, MTV's Quddus will serve as Emcee for the Voter Registration Rally while KIIS-FM's DJ Drew will get the crowd pumping. All across the nation, we're engaging youth to make certain their voices are heard on Election Day!

"This is such a historic election that I wanted to find a way to give youth 17 and under a voice," says Usher. "I wanted young people to understand, that this election does impact their life. It affects the type of education they receive, if they'll receive healthcare when they're sick and if they'll have help getting into college."

Count me as a fan. I like that Usher is 1.) spreading the word that one does not have to be able to vote to be politically engaged, and 2.) reaching young people even earlier in their lives than most GOTV campaigns. Also, when you think about it, many of those young people too young to vote in this election will certainly want to vote in the next election after registering voters during this cycle.

It goes without saying, the more politically engaged young people we have now, the better citizenry we'll have in the future.

Peter Levine of CIRCLE has a substantive post raising quite a few good points about service in America, especially as it relates to the Kennedy-Hatch 'Serve America' Act (S. 3487), a bill that, if passed, would significantly increase federal support for citizen service programs within the U.S.

My favorite part:

On balance, I think the field of "service" merits more federal support today. Despite the diversity of programs that would be supported, "service" generally advances several important goals.

First, it treats people of all ages as potential public assets, as contributors to the common good. This is philosophically appealing to me because it reflects a basic principle (which we could call Kantian) of respecting other people's moral agency. It also reflects a psychological theory known as "positive youth development." This theory proposes that young people, especially, are more likely to avoid pitfalls such as crime, unwanted pregnancy, suicide, and academic failure, if they are given opportunities to contribute their talents to the community. Most of our schools and other institutions basically treat them as bundles of problems or risks and seek to evaluate, track, prevent, and punish their failures. Cumulatively, such treatment sends a debilitating message. Opportunities to contribute can provide a powerful antidote.

This theory may seem romantic, but it is empirically testable and has been demonstrated in numerous studies. For example, a randomized experiment showed that it was possible to cut the teen pregnancy rate by offering young women service opportunities.

The bulk of the research has been focused on teenagers and young adults--hence the term "positive youth development." But there is no reason to think that the advantages of service to those who serve stop at age 25 or 30. We know that among elderly people, service correlates with mental health.

Emphasis is mine. This is why I think service is something in which the federal government needs to be involved.

One of my favorite books, Nixonland (by Rick Perlstein), asserts that the 1968 election is the basis for our campaign dialogue today. Republicans -- led by Nixon -- found political success in exploiting the cultural divide between "effete" liberal snobs/privileged, rebellious college students and the middle- to lower-class white worker. Since then, the Republican electoral coalition has perfected its practice of the wedge politics that has divided Americans into the red state/blue state "two Americas" that makes up our current political landscape. This kind of politics rejects the principle that everyone has something to offer the country. It's the "you're with us or against us" mentality.

A politics based on service -- and thus, the common good -- embraces the uniqueness of each American. A federal government that supports efforts to heighten service and civic education is advocating for the molding of a citizenry that is empowered, validated, and understanding of America's ideals.

Levine also makes a good point toward the end of his article -- service is not civic education or citizen engagement on its own. Service forms a vital portion of citizen engagement, but it needs to be paired with other empowering opportunities for citizens, such as participation in local political decision-making.

For decades now, we -- the citizens -- have taken a backseat to much of the important decision-making in this country. We've not been asked to sacrifice. We've been told that consumption is patriotic. We've been told to trust the government in making decisions on our behalf. Now that we're in the mess we're in, service and active citizenship are looking better and better.

What I've been reading today...

• A Politico piece looks at the meltdown's impact on student loans.
• An extremely large coalition, Election Protection 2008, is now on the scene this fall to protect voters rights.
• Obama continues his ascent in today's Gallup tracking poll; he now leads McCain 50-44.
• Barack Obama's going to debate camp in Florida this week.
• MyDD has the details on the unveiling of a Voter Suppression Wiki. Check it out.
• My home state (Ohio) is in the middle of trying to make itself more marketable for businesses, but there seems to be no mention of a lightrail system or other infrastructure discussions that would go a long way toward approaching their goal.
• Paul Rosenberg at Open Left looks at all facets of the Palin Plunge.
• A nice summary of the youth outreach effort this year by Peter Dreier at Huffington Post.
• The Guardian looks at student organization on American campuses.
• Usher co-authors a piece with Tom Nelson, also at Huffington Post, on service-oriented Millennials coming together with members of the Silent Generation and older Boomers, to make a difference.
• McCain adviser: We'll balance budget by 2013, even after bailouts. That's not budgetary policy we can believe in, my friends.