New Progressive Politics

The New York Times broke a front page story this morning about Verizon blocking the progressive group NARAL from sending “controversial” text messages. Within hours, Verizon has reversed its decision, calling it “an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy.” (The NYT online version has the updated reversal on top of the bulk of the original story.)

The whole episode is a good example of how the new tools of politics, like texting through mobile phones, are challenging the old norms and “dusty” policies and regulations. We’re in that exciting but confusing period when the changeover is happening and many old patterns and habits have to be re-thought and adjusted.

This story has another interesting twist for the New Politics Institute. Just yesterday, we released a major new study on mobile media and politics, authored by Jed Alpert, the CEO of Mobile Commons, which is the company hired by NARAL to get its text messages onto Verizon. Alpert is in the middle of this shifting story, and his NPI Memo on Mobile Media is now available on the NPI website, as well as video of a recent talk he gave on the subject at an NPI event in Washington DC. Alpert also posted on the NPI blog about mobile media this week before this firestorm broke out.

The Alpert memo follows on a major report about the coming power of mobile media released by NPI last year, by NPI fellow Tim Chambers, co-founder of Media 50 Group, a company helping people in politics use mobile media.

This mobile media space is one that NPI has been tracking closely and will continue to do as it gets increasingly important to politics over time. Stay tuned.

Peter Leyden

Almost everyone you want to reach in politics now has a mobile phone that they carry with them at all times. You can’t say that about computers connected to the internet let alone TVs at home. Yet political people are only just beginning to use this critical new tool that holds so much potential.

Read the New Politics Institute’s “Go Mobile Now” memo that introduces people in politics to how this tool is already being used in politics and will increasingly be used soon. The memo was developed by Jed Alpert and Chris Muscarella, the founders of Mobile Commons, a company with experience bridging the gap between what’s possible in the mobile field and what needs to be done in politics.

Watch Jed, the CEO of the company, give the talk version of the memo at the kickoff event of the 2007 New Tools Campaign in Washington DC late this summer. He explains how mobile media is different from other media and why it is so good at getting people to take action, from signing petitions, to calling representatives, to fundraising.

Also this week on the NPI website, Jed will make some blog posts that will point out current references to some of the ideas he laid out it the memo. You can view these blog posts off the NPI front page or the blog itself.

We encourage you to send this email around to those you know who might best use it. And next week we will tee up another of the 8 New Tools that progressives can immediately use this cycle. Thanks.

Peter Leyden

The big push of the New Politics Institute’s 2006 New Tools Campaign was to shift ad spending from broadcast TV to cable. This controversial political advice followed a trend firmly established in the private sector – to follow the audience’s migration to the more targeted medium. Many politicos did adapt last cycle by following our argument about why to buy cable.

This year we focus on how to buy cable, and how to buy it smart. Cable is more difficult to buy than broadcast, and so we developed a practical checklist that walks you through a step-by-step process that literally tells you what questions to ask. This memo is useful for anyone in the business of advocating for progressive values.

Read this new “Buy Cable Smart, A Checklist” memo, written by Ali Weise, NDN Executive Director. Ali was the Campaign Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Deputy Director of the DCCC’s Independent Expenditure Campaign in 2006, which spent over $55 million in television advertising last cycle to help Democrats win the House of Representatives.

Watch Weise (below) give a short talk that summarizes the recommendations at the kick-off event for this year’s tools campaign in Washington DC late this summer.

Finally, the memo ends with some thoughts on how the whole progressive movement might adapt to the shift to more cable advertising, including gearing up to produce more ads (that hit narrower targets), and reevaluating the financial incentives for media consultants who get paid the same for cable as they do for the easier broadcast. Something has to give.

As always, please send this memo around to whoever might benefit, and stay connected to our evolving body of work at the New Politics Institute.

Thanks.

Peter Leyden

Online advertising has many advantages over print and broadcast advertising, including super precise targeting and interaction with the audience. No wonder the sector is booming, with 25 percent growth in just the last year. So the New Politics Institute is focusing its first New Tools spotlight of the fall on this huge opportunity for progressives, with a call to “Advertise Online.”

Read “The Huge Opportunity for Online Political Ads,”  a terrific practical memo that introduces those in politics to online advertising, with a focus on the most popular forms, search ads, and display ads like banners and blogads. Even those who already are buying online will learn some great tips.

Or watch video of Henry Copeland, the founder of the pioneering company Blogads and a coauthor of the piece, as he gives an entertaining and informative 10-minute talk on the subject at the kick off event of this year’s New Tools campaign in late summer.

Copeland, whose Blogads connects about 1300 blogs to a wide range of private sector advertisers as well as some political early adopters, will make some blog posts on this topic this week. Check out his first post on the New Politics Institute website’s front page.

While there, check out other memos and video of the 8 New Tools that progressives can immediately take advantage of in this campaign. They range from "Go Mobile" to “Buy Cable,” and each week this fall we will spotlight one of them.

We hope you will spread the word through your networks and help everyone make the shift from the old politics to the new. And stay connected to our work at the New Politics Institute. Thanks.

Peter Leyden

So maybe the Republicans are going to put up a fight in the new tools space after all. After repeatedly watching the Dems innovate with new internet tools, Mitt Romney’s campaign has broken out with an initiative to allow supporters to create their own television ads. The campaign is using Jumpcut, which Yahoo bought last year, as the tool for “mashing up” video, audio and photos in creative ways. The campaign provides a base of content to use, but they also encourage people to upload their own material to remix.

“Mash-ups” refer to repurposing material meant for one thing to communicate another. It’s similar to the more familiar “remixing” of music from original songs into new creations. The mash-up technique has been used somewhat in politics, though not in official campaigns. The most famous example is the “Vote Different” remake of the Apple 1984 done by a person who remained anonymous for several weeks earlier this year. Moveon blazed a trail in the 2004 campaign by creating a contest to create a TV ad about “Bush in 30 Seconds.” However, all the submissions were original and there was no material provided to create the ads via a mash-up.

The Romney campaign is drawing off both strands and creating a contest where people can use official material in news ways. This has its pros and cons. The good side is that it allows many more people to potentially get involved because they have all the tools and material at their disposal and don’t have to shoot original video, etc. The risk is that people hostile to the campaign might hijack the material and put anti-Romney messages up. This actually happened last year in an attempt by Chevy to get regular people to make ads about their Tahoe. Somebody organized a bunch of environmentalists who used the clips of the car to create ads lambasting the gas-guzzling vehicles. (See the NPI talk by Julie Bergman Sender for more on this episode.)

Despite the risks, Romney is going down the right path. The most successful candidates will be those who can harness the energy and creativity of large numbers of American citizens. No one candidate or small team of consultants can pull off an election victory these days. They need the ideas, passions and efforts of many, many people working together for a long, long time.

Peter Leyden

When Karl Rove announced his resignation this week I'm pretty sure he did not expect the media to so swiftly declare his tenure a failure, and to start serious speculation that the great accomplishment of this "genius" was to give progressives an historic opening to advance their agenda.

Several examples today.  The Post frontpages a story that looks at the Rovian politicization of the Administration, which many, including NDN, believe went way beyond what was permissible or just (for years we've been calling the modern conservative machine an Information Age Tammany Hall).  Andrew Kohut looks at how much more progressive the nation has become, and Frank Rich wonderfully deconstructs Rove in his weekly column today. 

We weighed in on Rove with this piece earlier this week, and of course have been exploring this subject for the last several years.  A collection of our essays can be found in our Meeting the Conservative Challenge section.  A particularly worthy read is this essay, the Democratic Opportunity, which ran in the Politico in April and lays out what progressives and Democrats must to do to seize the opportunity Bush and Rove have given us.

This month a new book arrives from an old friend, Matt Bai, the talented New York Times Magazine writer. The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics - like everything Matt writes - is a good read, insightful, full of ideas big and small, and certainly worth picking up and making it one of your end of summer books.

The Argument takes an in-depth look at a process that NDN and its family have been at the center of these last few years: the re-invention and modernization of progressive politics. It is perhaps one of the most important and least understood stories in American politics today.

Whatever the short-term electoral outcomes of this decade in American politics, it will be remembered as one where the progressive movement, so dominant in the 20th century, shook off a generation-long period of drift and began to do what was necessary to take on a very powerful and modern conservative politics. The reasons for this are many: changes in campaign finance law, the Iraq War, the manifest failures of Bush and the conservatives to govern, even while they accrued more and more power. Today the progressive movement is much more 21st century than 20th, and is better able to play on the modern battlefield of today's politics. We've seen the creation of many new institutions: the Democracy Alliance, Media Matters, Center for American Progress, Center for Progressive Leadership, Democracy Journal, Catalist, America Votes; a whole new slew of internet-based players in the emergent "netroots" like MoveOn, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, MyDD and the Huffington Post; and we've seen the emergence of a whole new set of leaders from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, Rahm Emanuel, Andy Stern and Rob Stein.

Perhaps most importantly, all the new tools we have at our disposal today have made it easier for millions of Americans to partner with us in this critical effort to offer America a better path. Their arrival has brought more passion, more debate, more resources and is creating an entire new generation of leaders capable of serving the nation for years to come.

What Matt's book points out is that this process is still in its infancy, or in a start-up phase; and as such, it is in a very messy and emergent state. Overall Matt's assessment of all this, and of the people involved in this effort, is a little rougher than I would have liked, but that's the business we are in. But if Matt is correct in his assessment - and for this you should read the book - it means that there is much more for all of us to do in the coming days. Our work in building this modern progressive movement is far from finished. That is very exciting to me.

Looking ahead it is important to realize how much American politics has changed in the last few years. Just two years ago Bush and the conservatives were triumphiant. They had greater ideological control of the government than any time in the last 75 years. The progressives and Democrats appeared weak, in retreat, and unable to adapt to modern realities. But then the conservatives collapsed. Democrats won an historic victory in 2006. All measures of Party strength show the Democrats in the strongest shape they've been since before Reagan's election in 1980. The movement's infrastructure has become much more robust and modern. Progressives are way ahead in adopting a whole new set of 21st century tools to engage the Americans of today. Critical emergent constituencies - the new Millennial generation and Hispanics - are moving deeply into the progressive camp. And Democratic leaders are slowly re-orienting the debate and our government around the daunting array of 21st century challenges, many ignored by the conservatives in recent years, and many made much tougher to manage because of the conservatives' many mistakes.

So yes, Matt is right: there is work left undone. But left of center politics is so much more exciting, so much more passionate, so much more entreprenurial than its been since I joined it 20 years ago. We also have more wind at our back than at any time in the last political generation, and for all of this, I remain optimistic that this movement of ours, as imperfect as it is, is poised to take the reins and lead America with confidence and grace to meet the emerging challenges of our new century.

Rove has been called the "architect."  But of what? What did he build, and what will he leave behind? 

He guided Bush to two narrow and hard-fought victories, and briefly oversaw a conservatism that had more power in Washington that anything we had seen in 70 years.  But today those victories look like pyrrhic ones, as the conservative movement is in ideological and politics ruins, and the Democrats stronger today than anytime in a generation. 

So, as his epitaph I offer this:

Karl Rove was the "architect" of one of the worst governments in American history, and the one who engineered the end of modern conservatism, one of the most successful ideological movements of recent times.   

Brilliant yes. Bold, without a doubt.  A complete and utter failure who left his country and his movement weaker than he found it? Yep.

Eventually, perhaps, disgraced.

This thoughtful magazine is a little late to the party, but this piece is worth reading nonetheless.

As some of you may remember, I wrote an essay after the election called "the role of independents in the 2006 elections has been overstated."  An excerpt:

The early storyline then is that the shift from 2004 to 2006 came about from how independents swung.  They did swing 17 points, from 48R/49D to 39R/57D.  But a far greater shift happened inside the two parties, where there was an 8 point shift within the Democratic electorate, and a 4 point shift inside the Republican electorate, or a total of a 12 point shift. The Democratic vote went from 89/11 to 93/7, and the Republican vote 93/6 to 91/8.   

While less in percentage terms this 12 point shift happened in what is 3/4 quarters of the electorate, and this 18 point shift happened in what is 1/4 of the electorate.   So this means a far greater number of votes shifted in the last two years between and among the parties than shifted with independents - meaning that Democrats owe their victory much more to gains with Democratic and Republican partisans than they do to the gains they made with independent voters. 

This reduced role for independents was evident even in 2004.  John Kerry did what every Democrat was told was necessary to do win the Presidency - he won independents - and yet he still lost the election.  Why? Because the Rove machine pushed the percentage of the electorate that was Republican to an all time high, 37%, equalling the Democratic share, and they kept 93% of these Republicans.  Kerry while winning independents, only won 89% of Democrats.  This difference - between Rove's 93 and Kerry's 89 within their own parties - cost Kerry the election. 

Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers revisits this analysis, and offers a slightly different cut:

By now, we have all heard about how the great Independent swing toward Democrats from 2004 to 2006 was the key to Democratic victory. This is something many of us saw coming for quite some time, and we even dubbed it the "Indycrat" phenomenon. The first article I saw on this was a June 2005 post by Jerome Armstrong. During the rest of that year, it was a topic that was discussed other places like Donkey Rising, Survey USA and many other election focused outlets.

However, at Yearly Kos I briefly chatted with Simon Rosenberg who asked me to look into whether, from 2004 to 2006, Democrats received a greater vote swing from self-identified Democrats or from self-identified Independents.  The reason he asked me to do that is because he believed Democrats actually received more of a boost from self-identifying Dems than they did from self-identifying Independents. While I was skeptical of this at first, I just looked into it now, at it appears Simon was right. Comparing 2004 and 2006 exit polls, here is the estimated swing Democrats received according to partisan self-identification:

Overall Dem vote increase: 5.15%
Growth from Dem's: 2.41%
Growth from Ind's:  2.08%
Growth from Rep's: 0.66%

No matter how you slice it, the 2006 elections were decided much more by the behavior of partisans than independents, who have shrunk to a mere 26% of the electorate.  What has happened in recent years is that the extreme partisanship of President Bush has forced people to take sides, and the number of independents in the electorate has shrunk, their role becoming much less significant.  For a while this all worked for Bush, but as the recent Pew Center Study showed, the electorate has tipped to the Democrats, going from 43-43 in 2002, to 50-35 Democrat/Republican today.  A remarkable shift.  In 2006 Democrats got 52 or 53 percent of the vote, the Party's highest performance since 1982, and one of its ten best showings in the last 50 elections. 

It is safe to say that today Democrats have more wind at their backs then they have since 1982, a long 24 years.  While it is no guarentee of future success, it is critical to note that we are experiencing the most favorable environment Democrats have seen in a generation, and that this environment has come about from both Republican losses and Democratic gains.  Whether this becomes a structural shift in public opinion is up to the Democrats and their leaders.  Certainly the opportunity is there, and all this explains why early polls showing Bloomberg doing much more damage to the Republicans than the Democrats.  The country is much more Democratic today, and that support is strong and holding.  There just isn't a lot of room left over for an independent bid.  What has become loosened - Ds, Rs and Is - has swung to the Democrats. 

For more on all this, check out my recent essay in the Politico, called the Democratic Opportunity.  More post-election analysis from NDN can be found here.