NDN Blog

Young people (ages 18-29) played a pivotal role in the 2020 election. They drastically increased their turnout from 2016, and their strong preference for Democrats was decisive in the presidential, Senate, and House races. But young voters’ continued participation is not a given, and will require concerted efforts to sustain—and improve—in 2022 and beyond.

On June 15th NDN hosted Kelly Beadle and Alberto Medina from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), part of Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life, for a conversation about the youth vote in 2020 and in the future. They shared exclusive data on youth voter turnout nationally and state by state, as well as research-based insights on what works to engage the youth electorate. Thy also dispelled some myths about young voters; discussed the role of social media; and talked about the laws, policies, and practices that support more equitable civic development and electoral participation for all youth.

The discussion was moderated by Tufts alum Simon Rosenberg.  You can find video recording of the event here, and a copy of the deck they produced at the attachment below.  You can find links to CIRCLE's compelling research here. 

The importance of young voters is also at the very core of our big presentation about American politics, With Things Get Better, which you can catch live most Fridays this summer.  Thank you!

The Presentors

Kelly Beadle - Kelly Beadle joined CIRCLE in 2019 and manages CIRCLE’s voter registration research project. Her role is to lead qualitative and quantitative analysis on voter registration and participation, in addition to program evaluation for the project. Before joining CIRCLE, Kelly worked on program development, running field experiments and fundraising in numerous national and state-based organizations. She began her career and worked for over a decade in Minnesota, which she considers her home.

Alberto Medina - Alberto Medina has worked at CIRCLE/Tisch College since 2013. He collaborates with CIRCLE leadership on strategic communications, provides key editorial support to disseminate research, and maintains CIRCLE’s digital presence. He also oversees a wide range of communications tasks for Tisch College, including preparing remarks and presentations for the Dean. A graduate of Yale University, Alberto previously worked as a freelance writer and editor and at national newspapers in his native Puerto Rico. He is a commentator and advocate on the issue of Puerto Rico’s political status.

On Tuesday April 27th NDN hosted a discussion about the struggles of Democratic Party polling in recent election cycles with Jim Gerstein of the polling and data firm GBAO.  Jim's bio is below, and can you watch a recording of our discussion here.

Jim and his firm were one of five Democratic polling firms to have produced an analysis questioning why some Democratic polling has been so wrong in recent years.  It was a brave thing for professional political consultants to do, and we are excited Jim will be joining us to discuss what he thinks went wrong, and what needs to be done to make it less likely mistakes occur again.  This NYT essay by Giovanni Russonello does a good job summarizing the challenge Democratic polling faces today.  

Called Revisiting Polling for 2021 and Beyond the memo states:

"Together, we represent five survey research firms for Democratic political campaigns. During the 2020 election, we worked on the presidential campaign, every major Senate and gubernatorial race, and congressional races across the country. Our main job as pollsters is to provide campaigns with a strategic roadmap for winning, guide their messaging, and help identify the right targets for those messages.

Every one of us thought Democrats would have a better Election Day than they did. So, what went wrong?

Two weeks after the election, our firms decided to put competition aside to discuss what might have gone awry and to collaborate on finding a solution. There were several factors that may have contributed to polling error in 2020, and there is not a single, definitive answer—which makes solving the problem especially frustrating. In the sections that follow, we seek to explain what we’ve learned thus far in our ongoing efforts to “fix” polling, and what we still need to learn."

While here do review our current schedule of upcoming NDN Talks events, and check out recordings of past events with. Rep. Suzan DelBene, Ari Berman, Fernand Amandi and many more thought leaders. 

Jim's Bio

Jim Gerstein is a founding partner of GBAO, and provides research-based strategic counsel for candidates running for office, non-profit organizations, arts and cultural institutions, and Fortune 500 companies.  Over the past 20 years, Jim has conducted hundreds of focus groups and surveys across the United States, Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Australia to help individuals, organizations, and companies devise strategies that will enable them to meet their goals and improve quality of life in the United States and around the world. 

Jim has served as the pollster to numerous candidate and independent expenditure campaigns for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and municipal elections.  He has also conducted extensive research in the areas of political beliefs and values, charitable behavior, national security and foreign policy, public safety, the courts, digital users’ experiences, health care, medical devices, museums, Millennials, and American Jews. 

Prior to establishing GBAO, Jim led two different non-profit organizations through periods of substantial growth and influence.  For 10 years, Jim served as the Executive Director of Democracy Corps, a non-profit organization that conducts public opinion research and provides strategic advice to the progressive community. Under Jim’s leadership, the organization increased its annual budget seven-fold and dramatically increased its impact on our national debate.  Prior to his work with Democracy Corps, Jim was the Executive Director of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, where he led public education campaigns, congressional visits to the Middle East, and convened Middle East diplomats in the U.S. for meetings with business and political leaders.  During the 1999 Israeli Prime Ministerial campaign, Jim joined Ehud Barak’s U.S.-based consulting team led by James Carville. He served as the team’s representative on the ground in Israel, overseeing polling, paid media, and message development for the campaign.

Jim began his career working on several U.S. political campaigns and holding different positions within the Democratic Party. In 1992, he worked on the field campaign for Carol Moseley Braun’s successful run for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. In 1996, Jim worked in the press office for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and then directed the Clinton/Gore campaign for the north side of Chicago and northern Illinois.

Jim received an M.A. in Middle East History at Tel Aviv University and a B.A. in philosophy at Colgate University.  He grew up in the Chicago area and today resides in Washington, DC, with his wife and two sons.

On Tue, March 30th at 1pm ET NDN hosted Rep. Suzan DelBene (bio) for a discussion of her important new bill, the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act.  The bill would create a national data privacy standard to protect our most personal information and bring our laws into the 21st Century. 

Rep. DelBene hails from Washington State, is Vice Chair of the Ways and Means Committee and is the current Chair of the House New Democrat Coalition. 

You can watch the conversation here, and if you stay for the Question and Answer period, you can hear about how the American Rescue Plan is playing back in Rep. DelBene's district. 

NDN believes that adopting a national privacy consumer privacy standard is one of several steps Congress must take to restore the promise of the Internet and our digital life, and strongly supports this bill.  Simon offered this following tatement on the introduction of the bill: "Together, we have a lot of work to do in the coming years to restore the promise of the Internet. One of the areas of greatest need is in creating a single working privacy standard for the United States. In her bill, the approach Representative DelBene takes to protecting Americans’ privacy is smart, measured, and will undoubtedly be highly influential in shaping the approach Congress takes in the days ahead. It is a very welcome addition to the vital debate underway about our digital future."

Here's a bit more on the bill itself, and there is more below too.

DelBene On Privacy - Currently there is no federal data privacy law, resulting in states pursuing their own consumer privacy policies. However, in our digital world, a patchwork of different state laws will lead to confusion for people and businesses. A national standard is necessary to establish a uniform set of rights for consumers and create one set of rules for businesses to operate in.

Key elements of the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act include:

• Plain English: Requires companies to provide their privacy policies in "plain English." 
• Opt-in: Allows users to “opt-in” before companies can use their most sensitive private information in ways they might not expect. 
• Disclosure: Increases transparency by requiring companies to disclose if and with whom their personal information will be shared and the purpose of sharing the information. 
• Preemption: Creates a unified national standard and avoids a patchwork of different privacy standards by preempting conflicting state laws.
• Enforcement: Gives the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) strong rulemaking authority to keep up with evolving digital trends and the ability to fine bad actors on the first offense. Empowers state attorneys general to also pursue violations if the FTC chooses not to act.
• Audits: Establishes strong “privacy hygiene” by requiring companies to submit privacy audits every 2 years from a neutral third party. 

Simon offered this following tatement on the introduction of the bill: "Together, we have a lot of work to do in the coming years to restore the promise of the Internet. One of the areas of greatest need is in creating a single working privacy standard for the United States. In her bill, the approach Representative DelBene takes to protecting Americans’ privacy is smart, measured, and will undoubtedly be highly influential in shaping the approach Congress takes in the days ahead. It is a very welcome addition to the vital debate underway about our digital future."

On Tuesday, March 16th our NDN Talks series hosted our good friend Dr. Rob Shapiro for a discussion of thhe economic and societal impacts of the newly signed into law American Rescue Plan.  You can watch a recording of the conversation here.

This episode of NDN Talks will be beneficial to anyone wanting to learn more about what this landmark legislation intends to do, and the impact it will have on the US economy over the next several years. For a bit more of Rob's thinking on the current economic moment, check out his recent essay in the Washington Monthly, The Facts About Biden’s Economic Agenda and the GOP’s Cynical Response

Rob Shapiro's Bio

Robert J. Shapiro, the founder and chairman of Sonecon, brings broad and deep knowledge and experience in economics and politics based on many years of providing analysis and advice to U.S. presidents, senators, representatives and governors, members of the Clinton, Bush and Obama cabinets and other senior officials of those administrations, executives at Fortune 100 companies, and many prominent nonprofit organizations.  His analyses and views are respected around the world, and he has developed policies that affect the terms of healthcare, education, investment, taxation, regulation, trade, and government spending in the United States and elsewhere.

Beyond Dr. Shapiro’s leadership at Sonecon and role as advisor to presidents and public and private sector executives, he is also currently a Senior Fellow of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, a director of Overstock, and a member of the advisory boards of Gilead Sciences, Cote Capital, and Civil Rights Defenders, an international human rights NGO.

Before founding Sonecon, Dr. Shapiro was the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs (1997–2001), where he directed economic policy for the Commerce Department and oversaw the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau. Before that, he was co-founder and Vice President of the Progressive Policy Institute and Legislative Director and Economic Counsel for Senator Daniel P. Moynihan.

Dr. Shapiro holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a A.B. from the University of Chicago.  He has been a Fellow of Harvard University, the Brookings Institution, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Fujitsu Research Institute, as well as the McDonough School of Business.  For many years he was the Director of NDN's Globalization Initative. He is widely published in scholarly and popular journals, and the author or co-author of three books.

In addition to providing counsel to senior cabinet and White House officials under three U.S. presidents, Dr. Shapiro also advised British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.  He conducted studies and provided economic counsel to senior executives at companies such as Amgen, AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Gilead Sciences, Google, Nasdaq, and Verizon, among others.  On a pro bono basis, he has advised the International Monetary Fund and conducted studies for the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, the McDonough School of Business, and the Progressive Policy Institute.

In the political realm, Dr. Shapiro was the principal economic advisor to Bill Clinton in his 1991-1992 presidential campaign and senior economic adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016.  He also advised the campaigns of Joseph Biden Jr., Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Albert Gore, Jr.

March 9th - One of the great governing challenges facing the new Biden-Harris Administration is to begin repairing our badly broken information ecosystem here in the United States.  This is an area NDN has spent a great deal of time on in recent years, and we were pleased to bring you one of the leading experts on this topic earlier today, Ambassador Karen Kornbluh (bio below). 

You can watch our discussion here, and be sure to stay for the Q and A - it was a really informative part of the conversation. 

As prep for the recording, please check out Karen's Washington Post Op-Ed, "Three steps to help treat America’s debilitating information disorder;" her new report on deceptive content as covered in Axios; and her recent appearance on CBS News talking about disinformation and the January 6th attack on the Congress. 

If you haven't please do sign up to receive notices about our upcoming events, and be sure to check out our growing video library of in-depth discussions in the NDN Talks series. Recent guests have included Congressmen Scott Peters and Ruben Gallego, pollster Fernand Amandi, author and advocate Ari Berman, professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat and former prosecutor and MSNBC commentator Glenn Kirschner.  Most Fridays you can also find our live, always updated signature presentation, With Democrats Things Get Better too.

Karen's Bio

Ambassador Kornbluh has shaped public policy since the early days of the commercial Internet as a public servant and diplomat in the U.S. and internationally. The New York Times called her a passionate and effective advocate for economic equality. 

Today, she continues that work in two key roles: At the German Marshall Fund of the United States, leading its Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative to ensure technology supports democracies around the globe; and as chair of the Open Technology Fund, a government-funded nonprofit advancing global Internet freedom.

She was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris during the Obama Administration. There she spearheaded the first global Internet Policymaking Principles, gained OECD agreement to provide open access to its data, and launched the OECD Gender Initiative.

She served in the Clinton administration as both deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury Department and director of the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Federal Communications Commission, negotiating early Internet policies. She was policy director for then-Senator Barack Obama, and the author of his 2008 platform.

Kornbluh began her career as an economic forecaster at Townsend-Greenspan and worked in the private sector at various points in her career, including as a senior advisor to McKinsey and executive vice president at the global data firm Nielsen where she launched the Nielsen Foundation.

Kornbluh has held a number of fellowships, including at the Council on Foreign Relations where she was the senior fellow for Digital Policy, Mozilla, the Center for American Progress, and New America. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

On March 2nd at 1pm ET we hosted our good friend, noted pollster and MSNBC analyst Fernand Amandi for a deep dive on the Hispanic vote in America, with a special look at what's happened in Florida in the past few elections.  Among his many accomplishments Fernand was part of the team that oversaw Barack Obama’s very strong performance with Hispanic voters in the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections. 

You can view this latest episode of the NDN Talk series here.  Do watch - it was a really interesting discussion.

As a companion to this episode be sure to check out our new detailed look at the progress Democrats have made in recent years in the heavily Mexican-American parts of the US. This analysis includes a link to a new interview with Rep. Ruben Gallego, who reflects upon the many years of work that he and others undertook to transform Arizona from a red to purple/lean blue state.  It was great conversation, and Rep. Gallego and his colleagues have much to be proud of. 

NDN's analysis of Florida's Hispanic vote will also make good background reading for this discussion.  

Fernand's Bio

Fernand R. Amandi, President of the renowned strategic political consulting and opinion research firm, Bendixen & Amandi International, heads the operation and brings over twenty years worth of experience in research, communications and strategic management with an emphasis in corporate, political and public affairs consulting for clients including the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, Univision Communications, New America Media, NDN, the White House, the John & James L. Knight Foundation, the National Immigration Forum, the California Endowment, AT&T, Airbnb and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Mr. Amandi is a veteran of five presidential contests in the United States, including lead consultant roles in both of Barack Obama’s successful Presidential campaigns in addition to seven national elections in Latin America where he was developed research, messaging and strategy. Fernand has conceived, produced, and edited scores of successful television, digital and radio spots for B&A International’s media practice including the highly regarded “Nuestra Amiga” television ad for the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign, which Rolling Stone magazine lauded as “one of the more charming moments in the history of the political ad wars.”

Mr. Amandi is a political contributor to the MSNBC television network and has also been a frequent guest providing political analysis on the BBC, CBS’s Sunday Morning, CNN, Telemundo, National Public Radio, PBS, Univision and HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher and the HBO Features documentary film, 537 Votes. Mr. Amandi’s communications projects and political analysis, in both English and Spanish, continue to be regularly featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, Univision, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, The Economist, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, NBC Latino, the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, Diario de las Américas and Vox.

For the past eight years Mr. Amandi has also leveraged his experiences in politics, public policy and media as a professor in the political science department at the University of Miami, where his popular ‘Elections Course’ is typically the largest attended class on campus.

From 2015-2017, hosted the daily political talk show, The Fernand Amandi Show for iheartMedia’s 610 WIOD-AM radio station and since October 2017, Fernand has hosted the acclaimed weekly political podcast, Strange Days with Fernand Amandi.

Fernand is a graduate of Florida State University and resides in Coconut Grove, Florida with his wife and two children..

You can follow Fernand on Twitter: @AmandiOnAir

Simon in the NY Times– Simon got some significant air time in a major new NY Times analysis about the emerging dynamic inside the Democratic Senate majority: “The strategist Simon Rosenberg……said that he saw a minimum-wage increase as a winning issue with voters including those toward the center. Rosenberg called Republican lawmakers’ seemingly unanimous opposition to it a political “mistake.” 

Rosenberg said that if Democrats were able to burnish their brand by passing other major legislation aimed at workers and families, it could bode well for a minimum-wage increase — even in West Virginia. “I think Joe Manchin wants to be with the Democrats as much as he possibly can, and in order to do that, in his mind, he has to oppose them on certain things,” he said. “If in six months the Covid package is popular and the economy is coming back, Manchin’s going to have much more running room.””

Good COVID News– With FDA approval of the easy to use J & J one shot vaccine and both Moderna and Pfizer increasing their production runs, the US is now on track to be able to start fully vaccinating close to 70m PER MONTH starting in April. One reason the new COVID package Democrats are pushing is so important is that achieving that level of sustained vaccination levels – 4m a day, every day, for months - is going to require significant investment, which this bill provides.  If we can get to 4m by the end of this month we have an outside chance of hitting 200m people fully vaccinated by early June; and at that point the idea of having something like a normal summer becomes more than a dream.  

Also- do check out this thread which suggests that the vaccines may work to improve symptoms of people suffering from Long COVID (COVID symptoms that last for months beyond the original infection). NDN still believes we should announce a national campaign to get every senior vaccinated as soon as possible, in part to force the system to start addressing and working through the challenge of vaccine hesitancy now. This new Atlantic essay by Zeynep Tufekci about things we still need to get right about COVID is also very much worth a read.  

So we just finished up this next week's episode of NDN Talks - an indepth discussion about the savage attacks the GOP is making on voting with noted author Ari Berman, arguably the leading expert on these issues in the country today.  It was a great discussion, and Ari certainly left a lot for us to think about, and do.  You can watch the full recording here.  It lasts about 40 minutes. 

If you are to read one thing as a follow up to our talk with Ari, read his new essay in Mother Jones, "The Insurrection Was Put Down. The GOP Plan for Minority Rule Marches On."  And you can follow him on Twitter at @ariberman. 

If you liked today's discussion with Ari be sure to check out our upcoming schedule of events and our growing library of interviews in the NDN Talks series. 

Ari's Bio

Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones, covering voting rights. His stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Politico and The Guardian. He is a frequent guest and political commentator on MSNBC, NPR, PBS and C-Span. Ari’s work has earned him an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media and a place on the FD200 – 200 awardees whose work embodies Frederick Douglass’s enduring legacy of social change.

Ari is the author of GIVE US THE BALLOT: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction), HERDING DONKEYS: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, and the forthcoming MINORITY RULE – about efforts by white conservatives to entrench power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift.

GIVE US THE BALLOT was named a best book of 2015 by the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, the Boston Globe and Kirkus Reviews, and was nominated for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

Speaking topics include national voting rights issues; the history of voting rights in America; modern racialized voter suppression; partisan gerrymandering; American politics; the state and future of democracy; the intersection of money and politics; the 2020 census.

Check out this 2/19/21 edition of our singnature presentation, With Democrats Things Get Better.  It tells a story about post-Cold War America - that one party, the Democrats have been modern and successful.  The other party, Republicans, have been reactionary and repeatedly failed to deliver when in power.  

The presentation itself runs about 25 minutes and is new and updated each week.  In this Feb 19th edition we added some new national polling and COVID data from the early Biden days. 

Visit here to learn more about the big arguments behind With Dems, and feel free to sign up for our newsletter, NDN News, which will give you advance notice of upcoming With Dems and other timely and interesting events from NDN.