latinos

First some youthy news:

• Two articles are out today on polling. The Michigan Messenger does a great job analyzing a PEW study on the demographics of cell-only and "cell-mostly" users and how pollsters are dealing with under-represtentation of these demographics in their polling. If that's a little too data-geek for you, Campus Politico has a good "polling 101" story that might be a little more your speed.
• At Tapped, Tim Fernholz questions the effectiveness of a voter registration drive launched this week by the Hip Hop Caucus.
• Matt Zeitlin at PushBack follows up on that post, noting that celebrities are not an effective way to move young voters to the polls.
• Teaming up with SPIN, CMJ, and others, Head Count has launched a 90 day voter registration challenge. They hope to register 100,000 voters by the end of the 90 days. You can watch a video of SPIN at the Warped Tour interviewing an artist about the program here.
• NDN notes Connecticut Democrats are out-registering Republicans among young voters by 4.3 - 1. That registration and turnout advantage might help Democrats defeat Republican Chris Shays in the fall. Shays is the lone Republican congressman in New England.
• South Carolina young Republicans are not feeling the love from John McCain, and Young Republicans nationally are having a tough time drawing young people to the convention.
• Meanwhile, Young Democrats are thriving in delegate-rich Florida.
• Tech President argues that 2008 is a boring year in tech/politics. While 2004 and '06 saw huge paradigm shifts in how we organize, 2008 is all about refining those practices.

Some less-youthy, but very interesting news:

• Democrats are getting ready to spend $20 million to register and GOTV latinos.
• The Nation writes about MoveOn's 10th birthday and how far the organization has come.
• A new study by the RAND Corporation tells us the obvious - to win the war on terror, we need to stop fighting the war on terror.
• Finally, the Washington Post has a front-page story basically calling "liar liar pants on fire" on the McCain campaign for their latest ad attacking Sen. Obama.

I'm going to be on KRCL RadioActive in Salt Lake City at noon Mountain Time today. The program is scheduled to be an hour long and I'll be on with a number of local youth activist. Should be fun. Tune in if you can. Later tonight I'll be speaking at the Boulder Bookstore in Boulder Colorado at 7:30pm. If you are in the area, come hang out.

The internet knows things:

• John McCain tells Chris Matthews that he will "contest every youth vote" in the general election.
• McJoan at Daily Kos notes that in the deepest of deep red districts in Idaho, young high schoolers are converting to Democrats at dramatic rates.
• The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how the media and the parties are looking to engage young latinos, a large and fast-growing swing vote. Most interesting fact, half of all Latinos in America are under the age of 40.
• Michell Obama survives her appearance on the Colbert Report:

I'm guest blogging on TPM Cafe all week as part of their "Table for One" series. Over the next five days, I will essentially recreate in miniature the arguments laid out in my book. Today's installment just went live, and it is about the characteristics of the Millennial Generation. Hope you'll stop by.

In the meantime, here are a few quick hits for today:

• Hip Hop mogul and sometimes activist Russell Simmons has just endorsed Barack Obama. So have indie rockers Arcade Fire, who played a show last night in support of the Senator and will do so again tonight in Ohio. All of this begs the question - will the Obama campaign deploy a full-on culturally based field strategy at music events during the general election? Such strategies were shown (pdf) to significantly boost turnout in 2004.
• Meanwhile, Biko Baker wonders if Obama can be the Hip Hop president.
• Civic participation guru Robert Putnam writes about Millennials and the rebirth of American civic life in the Boston Globe.
• Heather Smith, Executive Director of Rock the Vote, looks beyond Obama in the Houston Chronicle.
• Finally, the Associated Press examines the Latino youth vote in an excellent piece that seems to be getting picked up by a lot of outlets.

Quick hits for a lazy Saturday. Look for an announcement here tomorrow.

• Are today's teenage girls the next generation of online organizers? Looks like it. A new study from PEW shows that young girls are more likely than boys to be online content creators (35% vs. 20%). The one exception is online video, which is still an area in which boys participate at twice the rate of young girls.
• In anticipation for March 4th, Sen. Obama is wooing young Latinos in Texas, trying to take a bite out of his opponents base. The senator was at UT Pan American this week speaking with students about his education plan.
• Hat tip to Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired for tipping me off to Hillary Speaks to Me, a grassroots video project designed to showcase Sen. Clinton's support among young Americans (from 4 - 35 looks like a descriptive range). The site is one of the most authentically bottom up efforts in support of Senator Clinton that I've seen. The creators say that it's not "too little too late," but I have to disagree. This would have been good to see eight or nine months ago, but at this point it is overshadowed by the sheer volume of quality user generated content clogging the tubes in support of Sen. Obama.
• At WireTap, Future Majority friend and researcher for CIRCLE Karlo Barrios Marcelo explains why three is the magic number.

I'm still working on my piece on the YDA/CDA super delegates, but wanted to alert you to these two stories:

First, TPM Cafe reports that Obama is up on the radio in Texas with a spanish-language ad aimed at young Latinos. By and large, Hillary has won the latino vote, and this is a pretty smart move for Obama looking to cut into her lead by picking up more points with his own base - younger voters. Here's a translation of the ad:

Clip from Barack Obama: "There is not a liberal American and a conservative America; there is the United States of America."

Barack Obama is talking to me.

He's faced many of the same challenges that we've faced in my family.

His parents weren't rich, but through hard work, he earned a scholarship and found his way — graduating from Harvard Law School.

And instead of accepting job offers that paid a lot of money, Obama decided to work with churches, giving a helping hand to those less fortunate in his community.

Clip from Barack Obama: In this election, in this moment, let us reach for what we know is possible.

Obama is talking to me.

About the opportunity to go to college … and about ensuring my parents and grandparents have the health care they need.

That's why I'm talking to others — my parents, my uncles, and my friends — because politics isn't just for those who like to fight, it's for those who want to build a better future.

Obama is talking to me, and he's talking to you too.

BO: I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message.

Second, Paul Krugman notes on his blog today that the subprime lending/credit pinch we're in is starting to impact providers of student loans, with bad results for students who rely on loans to meet their tuition:

Yesterday, the Michigan Higher Education Student Loan Authority, a state agency, said on its Web site that “due to the current and unprecedented capital-markets disruption” it will stop making loans under the state’s Michigan Alternative Student Loan, or MI-Loan, program. More than 100 Michigan colleges and universities participate in the program.

When hundreds of thousands of young latinos marched in the streets to protest HR4437, which would have established a border fence and instituted a variety of anti-migrant measures, their chant was "Today we march, tomorrow we vote."

In some respects this turned out to be true. The Hispanic vote swung dramatically towards the Democrats. Yet in others, it was less so. New voter registrations failed to materialize after the rallies.

A lack of political experience helps explain why the flow of new registrations has been halting. Some activists acknowledge that their groups have yet to master the nuances of voter registration drives -- a typically face-to-face task more complex than mobilizing a march. Others complain that political parties with the most to gain haven't financed registration efforts.

"Until the money is spent, 'Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote' will always just be a slogan," said Nativo Lopez, president of the California-based Mexican-American Political Association. "A million new registrations would cost about $10 million. Is anybody willing to pay that? I haven't seen it."

A new effort by Voto Por Tu Futuro (Vote 4 UR Future) seeks to change that. The effort is a partnership between Telemundo, mun2 - a youth focused channel - as well as political organizations like Rock the Vote, the US Hispanic Leadership Institute,and Democracia USA. Vote 4 UR Future appears to be primarily a media campaign, with PSAs and in-show advertisements directing young latinos to register to vote. In this, it would seem to most resemble MTV's Choose or Lose, a media blitz which funneled hundreds of thousands of young Americans to Rock the Vote's online voter registration tool in 2004.

In and of itself, this is a great first step. As NDN has noted, Hispanics are an important, growing portion of the electorate, and since the immigration debate they are voting Democratic by margins of 3-1. By 2050, they will be 1/4 of all voters, and they are already 18% of all Millennials. NDN also identifies young latinos, who are more acclimatized than their parents, as the political influencers in their households. Campaigns that reach out to and politicize these young voters make inroads to the larger Hispanic community.

Of course, this is only the first step. Registration is important, but it is all for naught if turnout doesn't increase as well. There is no indication as of yet as to what the campaigns GOTV strategy will be, though its partnership with Rock the Vote might give some indication. Research by Young Voter Strategies (now the research arm of Rock the Vote) show peer to peer outreach to be the most effective form of voter mobilization. We might see neighborhood canvasses in high-concentration hispanic neighborhoods led by one of the campaign's partner organizations.

Canvassing, however, is incredibly expensive. Especially for nonprofits with small budgets. The most likely form of GOTV we'll see is text message reminders in the weeks leading up to the election. When young 1st and 2nd generation americans rallied against punitive immigration legislation in 2006, those rallies were organized primarily by text message and social networking. According to a report by the New Politics Institute, Hispanic youth are twice as likely as whites to have a cell phone as their primary means of communication. Text Message GOTV seems a tactic ideally suited to turning out this community, and it is proven to be an effective GOTV tool. A recent study by Working Assets, Princeton, and the University of Michigan revealed that text message reminders are effective at bumping turnout by up to 5%, at the incredibly low cost of $1.56 per voter (compared to $30 for door to door canvasses). That's not a bad return on investment for cash-strapped non profits serving the Hispanic community.

For Democrats, this long overdue focus on Hispanics could potentially mean large gains in the South West, particularly in the swing state of New Mexico, where Hispanics already comprise over 30% of the electorate. How successful this campaign will be is an open question, nevertheless, this is an important development, and something to follow in the coming months.

It's been reported widely in the blogosphere and traditional media that the Republicans candidates are ignoring certain groups: Latinos, African Americans, young people. The DNC even went so far as to produce this video on the topic, which unfortunately doesn't seem to have gotten much attention:

I just wanted to point out that these are not mutually exclusive groups, and while it is bizarre that Republicans may be ignoring the future of what they themselves see as the core demographic for electoral success (white males) by skipping the Young and College Republican Conventions, they're also shunning a substantial portion of all young voters by skipping events like the Univision debate and NAACP forum.

According to a report by the New Politics Institute, 40% of Millennials come from a "minority" racial or ethnic group. Not that I'm complaining, but as Chris Bowers discussed on Open Left, that is a long-term strategy for defeat, particularly among Hispanics, who will comprise 25% of the total electorate by 2050 and already comprise 18% of all Millennials. In a number of states in the southwest, Hispanics have already surpassed 30% of the population, and in the swing state of New Mexico they are already 30% of the electorate. Young voters are the gateway to those families, as children of immigrants are frequently more acclimatized and function as political influencers for the rest of their families. (From NDN: Hispanics Rising)

My point is that ignoring African American and Latinos is also ignoring young voters. We've rehashed this many many times here, but you really can't say it enough: partisanship is a habit (pdf), and by ignoring these constituencies, Republicans are shoring up the Democratic base among three growing and overlapping groups that are going to overtake the electorate in the coming decades.

• MTV and MySpace are partnering with LaVibra.com to offer streaming translations of their candidate dialogues.
• Down With Tyranny profiles Andrew Rice, a Flaming Lips Fan from Oklahoma who wants to be the youngest person in the Senate. Rice is challenging Global Warming denier Republican Senator James Inhofe. (The Starburst is a new feature. Click on it to read all about Senator Inhofe's record.)
• The League's New Mexico chapter got some great ink this week.
• Democrats Work has an innovative idea they are deploying in the Colorado 2nd Congressional District. The group is sponsoring a straw poll among Democratic Primary opponents with the catch that instead of voting, candidate supporters will be asked to donate canned goods and coats on behalf of their candidate. Dubbed the "Coats and Cans Primary," the winner will be the candidate whose supporters collect the most donations for the community.
• Al Gore's immensely popular Live Earth organization is now sporting the Rock the Vote Voter Registration Widget. It would have been nice to capture registrations during the concert, when attention was at its height, but this is still a fairly exciting partnership.
• Finally, IDPI has released a new report: Poli-fluentials: The New Politics of Influencers. I haven't yet read the report, which is pay-for-access, but it doesn't seem all that new if one is to judge by the abstract. Basically take The Tipping Point, and Robert Putnam's analysis of two personality types - machers and scmoozer - and you've got this report. In a nutshell: Some people are influencers for networks of people who think about things in a similar way. You must reach those people in order to influence their network. Some networks and people overlap, allowing you to create bridges between multiple networks. People have been talking about this for years - yes, even in politics.

I've heaped praise on MTV over the past month for their innovation in reaching out to younger voters online, so it was disappointing to me to read this article in Ad Age announcing announcing MTV's Tr3s, a bilingual channel for Latinos.

NEW YORK MTV Tr3s, the bilingual channel for young Latinos, featured a first-ever platform Saturday for its viewers to voice their opinions on the immigration debate, an issue that is a personal one for many Hispanic youths who are undocumented or who have family members who are not legal U.S. residents.

For the fledgling channel, the move is part of a wider effort through other issue-themed programming on television and online to enhance the political clout of Latinos heading into the 2008 election. The immigration debate is expected to emerge as a key voter issue among Hispanics.

It isn't the channel or the project that I object to. 18% of Millennials are Hispanic, they are one of the fastest growing portions of the electorate, and young Latinos deserve a forum in broadcast media. With ethnic media becoming a force, it makes business sense for MTV as well. As Ad Age reports, advertising in the Latino youth market was a $2.9 billion industry last year.

My objection is with MTV's partner and sponsor: Salie Mae and the U.S. Army, respectively. MTV is selling this programming as a form of community service to young Latinos:

"MTV has a mantra of doing a lot of community outreach with the MTV Think campaign, and we're always promoting civic engagement and activism," Ballas-Traynor said. "For us [at MTV Tr3s], the perspective was, 'This is done a lot by Univision, Telemundo and others, but ours is a different audience with a different perspective.'"

Using the Think campaign Web site, MTV Tr3s will promote its issued-themed programming, giving viewers a chance to continue the dialogue on immigration and other issues such as education.

But, to paraphrase Kanye, Sallie Mae does not care about young people. They are a company that is involved in some of the student loan scandals that have graced the pages of our media in the last 6 months. They are a for profit company that exploits young people and the government, and worked hard to keep our student lending system highly inefficient and dysfunctional (though to be sure, more profitable for them).

If MTV had looked, they could easily have found a partner more suited to serving the interests of young Latinos. The Center for Community Change or the Ella Baker Center immediately jumps to mind. Working with MTV would be a huge profile boost for those organizations, both of which have roots in the communities MTV would be trying to reach. Instead, MTV is providing cover for an company whose interests are fundamentally at odds with those of the constituency they are purporting to help.

MTV's major advertiser, The U.S. Army, has a similar credibility problem. As has been reported in numerous places, the U.S. Army frequently uses Hip Hop culture to recruit African American teenagers, presenting a glorified image of life in the Army, and even a leg up on life. Yet few soldiers ever receive all the benefits they are promised by recruiters. I find it difficult to believe that the Army's intentions and tactics would be any less objectionable among Latinos.

It seems like MTV is doing the right thing in launching its bilingual channel, but if it is really concerned about giving Latinos a voice in the public debate and an equal place at the table in our society, it might want to look into brokering partnerships with organizations that actually have the best interests of latinos at heart. I don't expect MTV to be altruistic; they are a for profit company. But surely there are potential partners available that could better suit the interests of latino youth without hurting MTV's bottom line.