New Tools

Literally. In Clinton’s victory speech last night, young Millennials filled the stage behind her. This was in striking contrast to her Iowa speech, in which she shared the stage with a crowd of older people from the 1990s, including Madeleine Albright right next to her.

Both Clinton and Obama are aggressively courting Millennials, both for their votes, and for their energized involvement in their campaigns. Millennials are not just voters, but actors. And actors who deeply understand the powerful new tools of politics on the Internet.

The early numbers out of new Hampshire show how clearing the youth vote is trending towards Democrats and becoming crucial to the two campaigns of the leaders. Here are some numbers from CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement:

Initial New Hampshire Youth Vote Numbers:

* The youth turnout rate rose to 37% in 2008 compared to 18% in 2004 and 28% in 2000.

* 61% of young voters ages 18-29 in New Hampshire chose Democrats over Republicans (raw numbers are Democrats 43,753, Republicans 28,288).

* Young people choosing Democrats over Republicans continues the trend we saw in Iowa where 52,580 caucused with Democrats and only 12,650 turned out for Republicans.

Among Democrats, 18-29 year olds outperformed older voters (CNN exit polling):

* 18-29 year old voters made up 18% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary.
* 30-39 year olds made up 15%.
* 65 and older voters made up 13%.

Young people were split between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (CNN exit polling):

* 18-24 year olds supported Barack Obama (61%) over Hillary Clinton (22%);
* 25-29 year olds supported Hillary Clinton (37%) over Barack Obama (34%);

This is all consistent with what we have been hammering at the New Politics Institute over the last couple years. For more info about what we have been putting out and saying, see a previous blog post explaining four of our key reports.

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute

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.

They say young people won't show up. They tell reporters young voters are just "icing on the cake." They remind candidates young people are the "elusive voter" who may come to rallies but can't be relied on to caucus. They even tell young voters to stay home because you are not "from" Iowa.

Some go on to say it's so difficult to get young people to the caucus that I might as well go searching for the Holy Grail instead. I have also been told I am chasing windmills by targeting young voters.

I ignore the naysayers and call young voters my heroes. I need you to do the same.

Young people showed up in 2004. They showed up in 2006. They will show up again on January 3rd, 2008 at caucus sites all over Iowa.

We know that if a candidate targets young people they will turnout. Young people are not any different than any other constituency group. You talk to us, we vote. You ignore us, we ignore you.

When the Young Voter PAC got word that the Iowa caucus date would be moved to when students were on winter break, we knew two things. One, we needed to help get students who may be away on break back to Iowa. Two, this would put a kink in the plans of Democratic candidates who have been targeting young people-those in school and those not in school-and that we couldn't let this stop the momentum in the campaigns of strong and historic young voter outreach.

What we didn't expect was candidates on "our team" telling young people that if they are not "from Iowa" that they should stay home. On some levels we knew why they were doing this, but no matter the political reason we knew it was wrong for Iowa and wrong for our nation to try and disenfranchise students.

We immediately wrote blog posts and press releases. We started a Facebook group to get the candidates to do the right thing by young voters and they did-all the major campaigns issued statements in support of students caucusing in Iowa. We decided we couldn't stop there.

We started a campaign telling young people to come back and caucus and asking those who are not eligible to caucus in Iowa to help support young voters by donating money to the cause.

Donors who support young voters stepped up. We bought a bunch of blog, Google and Facebook ads. We sent over 58,000 text messages and emails to registered Democrats, ages 18-35, in Iowa. We pulled together a corps of youth voting experts and young people caucusing to talk to reporters. We asked volunteers not eligible to caucus to come to Iowa so we can monitor some sites we know a lot of young people will show up at to make sure they don't get turned away at the door.

The requests for gas money and hotel rooms started to trickle in. At first the forms were a bit slow to come in, but as of today we are already up to over 150 young people coming back to caucus. The reasons for coming back to caucus are simply inspiring.

Never in my life have I felt like I have such a strong stake in the political process of America. I am an adamant supporter of my candidate and have never felt this strongly about a politician or candidate in my life. I see this election as being pivotal in American history, marking either the renewal of America in the eyes of the worlds or a continuing backward slide into ambiguity and a world of danger and fear.

Being a student at Grinnell gives me almost a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to caucus in Iowa, and as Iowa usually sets the pace for the rest of the caucuses around the nation, I wouldn't want to miss it.

I want to play a role and have an influence on these elections. Being born in Argentina and recently receiving my U.S. citizenship, I want to take advantage of the opportunities I have been given. I don't want to regret not participating and then feel guilty that my preferred candidate was not elected.

All eyes are on Iowa. Which candidate will pull it out? What will a win mean for the rest of the primary schedule? Who will help pull the winner over the finish line?

I have a different question.

Why not be a hero?

Let's show them what we got. If you are eligible to caucus, come back. Be loud and stand proud at your caucus.

If you are watching this from another state and want to help out, donate today to the Young Voter PAC.

Whether you caucus or donate, know you are representing our generation, one that will change politics-who participates and who wins.

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

The Times has another, and fascinating, look at the fast growing world of non-broadcast TV, and how the use of video is being re-imagined right in front of us.  Called, Lots of Little Screens, TV is changing shape, it begins:

INEXPENSIVE broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.

And as they shift their focus away from TV to grab us on one of the many other screens in our lives — our computers, cellphones and iPods — the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.

According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August...