Political Technology

Check out the full post at: think.mtv.com

This is the first piece in a year-long series about young people, voting and politics.

How MTV's Street Team is Changing Politics

Our generation is changing politics-who participates and who wins.

Normally around this time of the year we hear from pundits and reporters that young people don't vote, they're apathetic, just a group of elusive voters and anyone that tries to get them to vote or involved in politics might as well be chasing windmills.

Well, we actually know what gets young people to vote. You simply talk to them about issues they care about both where they live and where they hang out and they turn out to vote. Better yet, they also stay involved in their communities year round.

Increasingly, young people are hanging out online and obviously live in all 50 states including DC. So if you want more young people involved in politics, you are probably wondering what will work in 2008 to get a critical mass of young people to the polls. Just how can you get more than 20 million to turn out this time around? Welcome to MTV's Street Team ‘08.

Before the Now, First the Then (or lessons learned)
2004 was the first time we saw an increase in youth turnout in over a decade. The last time before that was 1992 when MTV's Choose or Lose program targeted politicians to get them on record about issues young people care about. Bill Clinton embraced MTV, wrapped himself in the MTV flag just like Madonna did in her famous ad on MTV in 1990, and the youth vote that year helped propel him to the White House.

The giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week will devote one of its super sessions to “The Changing Face of America’s Elections,” though it’s really about the impact of new tech and new media on politics.

I will be one of the panelists on Monday discussing this with Grover Norquist, President for Americans for Tax Reform, and Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, among several others. It seems I will be holding up the more progressive end of how this technology is impacting the elections. Norquist and Charles Bass, CEO of Republican Main Street Partnership, will be holding up the other end.

The CES conference is a massive annual gatherings (among if not the biggest conference in the world.) It is where all the new tech products for the coming year are unveiled, and the tech tribe gathers to geek out on gadgets. However, it is a very important networking moment, and in the middle of it all this year, will be a discussion of politics.

If anyone in the NDN or NPI networks are in Las Vegas for this, come to the show on Monday morning, or ping me and we can connect.

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute.

Among the many things that happened last night in Iowa was a very high turnout of young voters. For the last several years NDN and its affiliate the New Politics Institute have been making the case that a new generation of young Americans known as the Millennial Generation was poised to make a tremendous impact on politics.

As background please visit the following resources:

The 50-Year Strategy:

This article lays out a grand strategy for how today's Democrats could build a lasting electoral majority and today's progressives could seize the new media, build off new constituencies like Hispanics and the millennial generation, and solve the urgent governing challenges of our times.

The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation:

In this report, we take a comprehensive look at almost all available surveys and polls that have tried to figure out the politics of this important new generation of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. The cumulative evidence shows that this generation is overwhelmingly progressive and unusually engaged in politics. (Video of an event we did around this report can be found here.)

Politics of the Millennial Generation:

This survey examined in detail the attitudes and behavior of three American generations — the Millennials, Gen-X'ers, and Baby Boomers — and, within the Millennials, three sub-generations, Teen Millennials, Transitional Millennials, and Cusp Millennials. Together the three generations consist of Americans 13-54 years old who were born from 1952-1993.

New Tools: Leverage Social Networks:

The final memo of our 2007 New Tools Campaign lays out how the booming social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace can be used to do many of the old-fashioned fundamentals of politics: branding, voter registration, fundraising, volunteering and voter turnout.

Travis did a great job collecting up the final round of Iowa ads, which you can find here.  

What I found most interesting was how many ads ended with a direct to camera appeal, and that the Democrats ran almost no negative or comparative ads throughout the entire Iowa  campaign.  Political advertising is going through a big change.  More emphasis on authenticy, realness.  With somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of all voters next year likely to skip all TV commercials (due to DVRs) political TV is fighting hard to break through, connect, in an age of savvier viewers with many more media and information choices.

After the election tonight it is going to be worth spending time discussing what all this means for independent third party media in 2008.

In a post yesterday Markos reflects upon his site traffic since he began his blog in 2002. It is a remarkable post, as you can watch his traffic grow from month to month, to the point today where DailyKos has 16m pageviews a month, or 500-600k a day.

I first met Markos in the summer of 2003. The ever thoughtful writer Garance Franke-Ruta introduced us. At the time his early blog was getting 800k or so pageviews a month. By the time he spoke at a conference we did in SF in late 2003 it was 2m a month. By the time of our Annual Meeting in 2004, where Markos made what I believe was his first public appearance in Washington, it was 5m a month. And by the time Crashing the Gate was released in March of 2006 it was up to 22m a month (click here to read my foreword to CTG). Today the site traffic has leveled off to a still daunting 16m a month, and Markos has helped inspire many to get off the sidelines and into the arena, including Gina Cooper, the founder and visionary behind Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos), the most important annual gathering of emerging progressive leaders in the country.

The rise of sites like Daily Kos and the netroots has been one of the most significant developments in American politics in the early part of the 21st century. My friendship with Markos and his colleague Jerome Armstrong has been among the most rewarding and interesting of my long career in media and politics. The success of Daily Kos and other such blogs should leave no doubt that progressives and their allies the Democrats are in the midst of building a new and more competitive culture and movement, one much more suited to the emerging challenges of the 21st century than ever before. As Matt Bai rightly points out in his new book, this new movement is new, emergent, experimental and has made plenty of mistakes. But could any start up be any other way? While the 1990s in Silicon Valley gave us stinkers like Pets.com, it also created enduring and powerful companies that are still redefing our lives today. Periods of great institutional entrepreneurship and reinvention are by nature messy things. This period of progressive reinvention is no different.

For I can no think of no time of all my years in politics that what we know as left of center politics is as vibrant, innovative, dynamic, open and nascently strategic as it is today. With control of Congress and perhaps the Presidency in 2009, we will also see if this movement is ready to lead America at one of its most challenging junctures in its history (see our recent essay The 50 Year Strategy for more on this).

No matter where we go together next year I end this one with a hearty salute to the millions of Americans who have "gotten into the game" in recent years - giving money, volunteering, blogging, commenting, reading, engaging and voting in unprecedented numbers. At the end of the day it is my hope, my belief, perhaps my prayer that these new technology tools that have allowed private citizens like Markos - and millions more - to enter the great American debate in new and powerful ways will end leading the renewal of our mighty but wounded democracy in the years ahead, providing the ultimate antidote to the imperial age of Bush. While leaders like Markos have gotten plenty of attention, the power of blogs like Daily Kos is that they have become vehicles for millions to be connected to and participate in our democracy like never before, making our politics - I hope - ever more one "of the people, by the people, for the people." And for all this I end this year excited and hopeful about our nation and our politics in the critical year ahead.

Happy New Year....

Matt Bai has proven once again that he has that rare ability to see the meta-story within the myriad daily stories on the Presidential race. In his New York Times magazine column this Sunday, he points out one of the key shifts going on in politics – from highly controlled, top-down presidential campaigns to much more decentralized, bottom-up campaigns. The shift is underway, but most of the current presidential campaigns are resisting this mightily.

Bai looks at a few exceptions. There’s the crazy case of Ron Paul, whose campaign has been effectively taken over by libertarian techies who were able to raise $4 million in one day of online contributions – way beyond anything that the official campaign has been able to raise. And then he looks at how Obama has benefited from bottom-up energy, such as the Obama Girl and her video that has been seen more than 4 million times.

This fundamental shift is something that Simon and I laid out in our magazine piece The 50 year Strategy, still on newsstands for Mother Jones. We took a longer-range, historical lens to our current political situation, and pointed out that shift in the nature of campaigns, among several others things, that will be seen as the biggest development of the period we are now in.

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute

I am always looking for how the campaigns are using mobile media... and found this quote on MyDD talking about the Obama camp use of the medium at their recent big events:

"Now today, I read an account of Obama's South Carolina Oprah rally and was impressed by the further innovation of how the campaign is continuing to exploit his crowds. This strikes me as rather brilliant.

The campaign attempted to organize that enthusiasm by asking the crowd to text their cell phone numbers to the campaign. Jeremy Bird and Anton Gunn, the campaign's field and political directors took the stage to ask the crowd to text their phone numbers to Obama's campaign. They also broke a Guinness World Record by conducting the world's largest phone bank, 36,426 people in the audience called four names of South Carolinian voters listed on the back of their tickets and asked them to support Barack Obama.

Here, we see his campaign collecting supporters' cell phone numbers rather than e-mail addresses for more immediate access to them, and has taken the exploitation of the crowds as activists one step further by actually having them make calls right there."