presidential

Jane Fleming Kleeb is the Executive Director of the Young Voter PAC which helps Democratic candidates and State Parties win with the 18-35 year-old vote through endorsements, on-the-ground support, training, strategy and money. She is a regular on Fox and is part of MTV’s Street Team ‘08 representing Nebraska.

Nebraska’s Democratic Caucus is on February 9th, 2008.  Residents all over Nebraska will go to community places, like churches and fairgrounds, to talk with their neighbors about who they are voting for in the Presidential race.  Hear from fellow young people in Nebraska about what the caucus is, how it works and who some people are thinking of caucusing for on February 9th.  Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada all had record turnout among 18-30 year olds, Nebraska is getting ready to continue the trend.

Jane Fleming Kleeb is the Executive Director of the Young Voter PAC which helps Democratic candidates and State Parties win with the 18-35 year-old vote through endorsements, on-the-ground support, training, strategy and money. She is a regular on Fox and is part of MTV’s Street Team ‘08 representing Nebraska.

We have plenty of theories this morning on how and why Clinton pulled out a win in the New Hampshire primary. I am happy to say the youth vote is not being blamed for Obama's loss and instead the Clinton campaign and even some pundits are saying it was because of the youth vote that she won.

Our first concern in the youth vote community was less about who won or lost, and more about how the surge in Iowa would be portrayed if Obama did not win. The conventional wisdom in 2004 was all young people were voting for Dean. That was not true, young voters were split between Kerry, Dean and Edwards. However, that didn't stop the media from blaming young people for Dean's loss. Additionally, when Kerry lost the general election, we spent the next four years explaining that young people did turn out beating a record high from 1992. In the end, it simply did not matter though, the media wrote the youth vote story and it was "young people are all hype, they say they will show up but don't."

Cynics and pundits are on message now. We did not hear many people last night blaming Obama's loss on young people and rather they were claiming it was young people who helped propel Clinton into victory. There may be something to that.

Obama has a wider youth campaign strategy and a broader youth movement happening right now which is why overall he has higher youth numbers. The Clinton campaign saw this and went after a group within the youth demographic they knew they could get-young professional women and working-class young people. Youth turnout overall jumped to 43% up from 18% in 2004.

Obama overwhelmingly got the 18-24 year old bloc (60% vs 22% for Clinton). The 25-29 year old bloc was split, with Clinton having a 2% advantage over Obama (37% Clinton, 35% Obama). If anything, the Clinton win gives the youth vote community an opportunity to tell the story that young people can and must be found on and off campus. Only about 25% of young people are in college, so if you want the youth vote you have to go where they live and where they hang out.

In last few days of the campaign, Clinton was able to appeal to working class young people with her message of Obama living in the clouds and she is working in the trenches. With this basic point, the Clinton campaign went after the 25-29 year old block.

We also can't overlook her moment of tears. Some will say it was contrived, but it seems women ages 25-29 looked at that as first time Clinton showed that politics is about passion, not just a job. Young women in this age group are working on their early careers, struggling with making it and probably have had moments like Clinton had in the coffee shop. They may have said to themselves "yeah, I know how that feels when you work your butt off, try your best and it doesn't seem to work out." So they gave her another shot with their votes.

The good news for young voters is both campaigns-and I would bet Edwards as well-are looking at how much they are investing in their youth programs. We will be watching how the candidates talk about young voters, talk to young voters and what their GOTV efforts look like in Nevada and South Carolina and leading into Super Tuesday.

Young voters now have to decide-are they "fired up" and "ready to go" or do they jump on the "experience" bus. At the very least, the campaigns will have to retool their youth programs to reach the youth communities in Nevada and South Carolina. South Carolina has a large African American population and Nevada has large Latino population - two parts of the youth community that in 2004 voted in record numbers for Democrats. We are confident Democrats will win the youth vote, 80% of young people in Iowa and 61% in New Hampshire voted for Democrats. The only question we have is which Democrat will they go for?

The Young Voter PAC is doubling down in NH…and we need you to do the same. We just got back from Iowa. We are elated that the media and political establishment is talking about young voters as real voters...not a mythical creature, an elusive bloc or just us as great volunteers. Everyone is truly talking about the huge impact young people made on the win for Obama in Iowa and the role they will have in upcoming primaries.

So, we decided, even though its only a few days away to go into NH.

* We just deployed a text message to 96k 18-30 year olds (Dems and Indys) in NH. A follow up email will go out on Monday.

* We are offering gas money again to students who might be on winter break.

* We are setting up a peer to peer call system to help folks find their polling location.

* We are buying facebook, google, newspaper and blog ads.

* We will go on tv as much as possible getting the word out.

Most of all, we need your help with this.

We had not planned on going into NH so this is a fast job to pull off.

Can you send to your list (or even your circle of friends) the email below? We need folks that are willing to volunteer to help folks find their polling location and we need help on facebook getting the word out (e.g. we also need folks willing to go all around facebook and look up NH groups and young people and tell them about the pledge and gas money).

I am open to other suggestions of what else we can be doing in this short period to try and help increase turnout.

Let me know if you have any questions or other ideas. I can be reach at jane@youngvoterpac.org.

EMAIL TO YOUR LIST + FRIENDS

The Young Voter PAC just left Iowa helping students get to their caucus sites and now they are headed to New Hampshire to help get the youth vote out. They need your help. If you can help them out, email Liz at weaver.eh@gmail.com. We’ve got to pull together in the next few days and do as much as we can to continue the youth vote story. Remember, we target young people and they show up. Let’s not let them down.

1) Volunteer to help make peer-to-peer calls from your house to folks in NH who need help finding their polling location, email weaver.eh@gmail.com if you can help out.

2) Get on Facebook and let folks know in your network that the Young Voter PAC is helping with gas money and helping young people find their polling location, join the Young Voter Pac’s group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16080515354 to stay updated with all activities.

3) If you go on tv to do media or if you write on a blog, please start talking about how young Iowans showed the power of the youth vote and that we need young folks in NH to do the same. Remind people we have gas money to help get them back to their campus polling site if needed (only one school is back in session, Dartmouth).

For the last year or so I have been telling anyone who would listen that Al Gore will become the next President of the United States. I have numerous reasons for believing he'll be a sure thing when he makes the jump, but the biggest reason why Gore will win is the combination of his mastery of the media environment and his past campaign experiences.

While all of the other candidates are jockeying for position within the political community, Gore is not-so-quietly building his cultural cachet he will need to actually win. Those of us who are consumed with politics 24/7 always seem to forget that the other 75% of people don't pay much attention to politics when there isn't an immanent election, and yet it is that other 75% that a candidate needs to win over in order to win (even in a primary). And while most candidates would find it tough, if not impossible, to reach out far beyond the political sphere, Gore doesn't have such troubles. An Academy Award winning blockbuster documentary, a book tour, and the largest concert in human history (which will happen this summer) have a way of raising ones profile. And while some people still believe that Gore is perceived as the boring-bot that he seemed to be during the 200 election cycle, I think that he now appears to be... Presidential.

I also believe that he can effectively mobilize the younger voters of the nation, espescially when he picks Obama as his Vice Presidential candidate. Take a look at him on the Daily Show (over at Crooks and Liars), where he was promoting his new book, and tell me that Gore doesn't hold the most promise for turning our nation, and possibly the world, around:

He also had a great interview session with Larry King, who I usually cannot stand, where he, among other things, skewered all of the other candidates (though in pretty subtle ways). I have only found an edited version of the interview, but you can still get the picture:

The question that I have is pretty simple: how can I get a job on the Gore campaign? How do you send in an application for a job that doesn't exist yet?

This election will be won or lost on the internet. Specifically on MySpace. The campaign that has the most friends on MySpace will get Iowa Caucus voters to vote for them. Fact.

The development of Internet strategy that came out of the Dean for America movement, from plans on how to organize volunteers recruited online, to the technology development which will populate content across many website platforms and external webservices, spreading into niche communities via word-of-mouth… all of that pales in comparison to a Presidential Campaign’s ability to add friends on MySpace.

Popularity on MySpace has supplanted an entire industry and rendered moot all expertise in online politics aside from the ability to add friends.

The person on MySpace with the most friends shall be deemed President and the #2 finisher is the Vice President. Right now, I’m calling the race for Tom and then Dane Cook for Veep, and Lamp as Secretary of State.