The Gadflyer and MyDD have both mentioned the possibility of Simon Rosenberg leading the new Democratic National Committee. But Jerome Armonstrong recommends a smarter manuever:

Way back in the Summer and Fall of 2003, when we were flying high with Dean and the Netroots, there was one guy in DC that figured out what was going on, and took a lot of shit for trying to parlay that understanding to the DC Democratic Party establishment. That was Simon. I have an easier solution. Why don't we just call the NDN the new DNC?

Fact vs. Fiction –The Youth Vote in 2004

Posted by jason at November 5, 2004 06:00 PM | TrackBack

Young people representing the under 30 set turned out in record numbers this week to exercise their right to vote despite many of them having to wait hours in line at unprepared polling locations. The Palm Beach Post in Florida and Morning Journal in Ohio report:

"My grandfather is from Cuba and he supported Bush all the way," said Christopher Vazquez, 21, a student at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. "But I voted for Kerry. I thought he rushed into the war, we've got high deficits, and tuition is up. It went up 15 percent this year and they cut back on grants, too."

'We've been here since 5:30,'' said Ted Parker, an 18-year-old Oberlin Conservatory student from Chicago who was still standing in line at 9 p.m. ''It's pretty important this year, I think everyone agrees to that.”

According to an analysis of exit polls and early-vote tallies released on Wednesday by the Center for Information & Research on Civil Learning & Engagement, at the University of Maryland at College Park, at least 20.9 million people ages 18 to 29 voted on Tuesday, an increase of 28 percent, or 4.6 million, over 2000.

Turnout rose by 9.3 percentage points, to 51.6 percent from 42.3 percent four years ago. The previous peak came in 1992, when 47.9 percent of young Americans voted.

Young people voted at a much higher rate in contested, “battleground” states. In the ten most contested states, youth turnout was 64%, up 13 percentage points from 2000. In the battleground states, the youth share of the electorate was 19%. In the remaining 40 states and the District of Columbia, youth turnout was 47% and the youth share of the electorate was 18%.

The days following the November 2nd election have been dominated by misleading stories in the media reporting that turnout among young voters did not reach “expectations” and that the “youth vote” was not a factor because Kerry lost.” The spark that ignited this misinformation was a syndicated Associated Press story published on election night that claimed young voting turnout was “identical to 2000 and represented one in ten voters”. This was story based on exit polling taken earlier in that day and focused exclusively on the 18-24 set. It failed to take into account absentee voting, and confused young voters’ share of the electorate with their percentage of turnout.

This past October Harvard’s Institute of Politics released a poll that found that 42% of college students planned to vote by absentee ballot” The poll also found that nearly “72 percent of college students report that they are "certain" they are registered to vote and "definitely" plan on voting this November," representing, the over nine million college students in America.

Furthermore, in a recent email sent to supporters of Rock the Vote, Washington DC Director Hans Riemer explained that, “Reporters are confusing numbers about young voters’ share of the electorate with their percentage turnout. Their share of the electorate did not increase, but their turnout shot through the roof.”

Not so ironic, the findings in the AP story are now being echoed by many Conservatives in academia and the media, as an attempt to brand this false perception as a referendum on Democrats, and the Kerry campaign. Even in the face of victory conservatives are furious that young people favored Kerry by wide margins, despite an aggressive effort by College Republicans to persuade students towards President Bush, spending over $8 million in 2004. Associate director of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government David King wrote in recently wrote in an Op/Ed that appeared in the Boston Globe:

According to exit polls, Senator John Kerry won the under-30 set with 54 percent of the vote to President Bush's 44 percent. The Democrats lost every other age group. Without young Democrat voters, President Bush would have rolled to victory in Wisconsin and New Hampshire; Iowa and Nevada, too, would have been much bigger wins for the president.

Still, the question remains unanswered:why were so many polling locations surrounding college campuses unprepared for the expected increase in voter turnout? Making sure voting is accessible to young people is in the long term political interest of the Democratic Party. We must never again allow this to occur to a first time voter:

Thomas White, who at 23 was seeking to vote for the first time, reluctantly gave up after waiting 90 minutes in the rain. When he reached the door of Thurber Towers on Neil Avenue in Victorian Village, he was told the wait would be another two hours.

"I was frustrated and disappointed,'' he said. "This is an election that I wanted to participate in. I can't risk losing my job.''

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada's main immigration Web site has shot up six-fold as Americans flirt with the idea of abandoning their homeland after President George W. Bush's election win this week.

"When we looked at the first day after the election, November 3, our Web site hit a new high, almost double the previous record high," immigration ministry spokeswoman Maria Iadinardi said on Friday.

On an average day some 20,000 people in the United States log onto the Web site, www.cic.gc.ca -- a figure which rocketed to 115,016 on Wednesday. The number of U.S. visits settled down to 65,803 on Thursday, still well above the norm.

Bush's victory sparked speculation that disconsolate Democrats and others might decide to start a new life in Canada, a land that tilts more to the left than the United States.

Would-be immigrants to Canada can apply to become permanent resident, a process that often takes a year. The other main way to move north on a long-term basis is to find a job, which requires a work permit.

Youth came through with big turnout

By David C. King  |  November 4, 2004

AMERICA'S young people were buzzing about the presidential campaign before Election Day. College towns saw sky-high registration numbers, and young adults told pollsters they planned to vote. What happened?

Despite long lines and registration snafus, voters under age 30 clocked the highest turnout percentage since 1972. The good news is that America's young people are more engaged in politics than at any time in two generations. Aging cynics have been quick to blame the kids for a host of political lapses, but the cynics have it wrong.

Start with the numbers. According to professor William Galston at the University of Maryland, at least 20.9 million Americans under 30 voted on Tuesday. That is an increase of 4.6 million voters from 2000. Four years ago, just 42.3 percent of young people voted. This year more than 51.6 percent did.

Young people were especially active in battleground states, with turnout at 64.4 percent of eligible voters. Furthermore, these estimates understate things, because college kids are more likely than other groups (except the military) to vote by absentee ballot. Surveys of college students around the country, done in the weeks before the election, found 42 percent of students planning to vote absentee. Exit polls completely miss these young voters who numbered, this year, close to 3 million.

According to exit polls, Senator John Kerry won the under-30 set with 54 percent of the vote to President Bush's 44 percent. The Democrats lost every other age group. Without young Democrat voters, President Bush would have rolled to victory in Wisconsin and New Hampshire; Iowa and Nevada, too, would have been much bigger wins for the president. In political circles today, Democrats are blaming young Americans for not showing up, and Republicans are chortling over their allegedly low turnout. Nonsense. Rather, both parties should be seeing their future in the eyes of young voters.

Turnout was up among every demographic group this year, thanks to an impressive get-out-the-vote effort by both parties. Young people were the ground troops that visited voters door-to-door and manned phone banks for both parties on Election Day.

Democrats should not take much comfort, though, in the partisanship of the young Americans. According to research by Harvard's Institute of Politics and pollster John Della Volpe, most college students no longer fit neatly along a liberal to conservative continuum. Their support for John Kerry was largely a reaction against President Bush's actions in Iraq, while they judged President Bush to be a stronger leader with a more "authentic" personal style.

Earlier this year, we asked a national random sample of college students their opinions on a range of issues. Using a statistical technique called "cluster analysis," we looked at how answers to one question predicted answers to others. What emerged was clear evidence of two political worldviews among young people. The first worldview, which accounts for 49 percent of college students, fits the old definitions of liberals and conservatives. The second worldview, amounting to 51 percent of students, is neither liberal nor conservative. These young voters base political judgments on religious and moral grounds. They fall into two distinct camps: religious centrists and secular centrists, and neither group is predictably conservative or liberal.Young religious centrists, for example, tend to support universal healthcare and affirmative action, while simultaneously calling for and end to gay marriage. Religious centrists are more likely than their secular counterparts to vote, and both parties will need to court them.There is a new religiosity among America's young people. Their burst of activism in both parties comes from deep convictions about caring for the poor, for their communities, and for families. Community volunteerism is at an all-time high. So is church attendance. While 29 percent of the general public call themselves "born again Christians," fully 35 percent of college students embrace the label. The new battleground of American politics -- with young voters as the ground troops -- will be over how to address the moral idealism of today's youth. Will it be a version of community found in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, or will it be more akin to the Book of Revelations? Among the religious centrists -- those crucial swing voters for both parties -- the very definitions of "politics" and "community" are at stake.

So, yes, the young voters turned out, and they did so as never before. That news alone may frighten the political establishment. Old line partisans of the left and right can no longer ignore these young voters.

David C. King is associate director of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government

 

All of these calls for Democrats to become more religious are ignoring the obvious. Republicans are not that much more religious than Democrats, they are just way more white and Protestant. They represent the interests of white Protestants, while we represent the interests of the vast majority of everyone else. However, because white Protestants are not enough to win, Republicans have begun to make an alliance with devout Catholics in order to maintain their majority. Eventually, as national demographics continue to change and as an alliance is formed between white Protestants and devout Catholics, the two parties may become white Christians versus non-Whites and non-Christians. This, of course, assumes that we are able to reverse our slide among Latinos, and thus prevent sinking back into near-permanent minority status ala the 1980's and 1990's. Either way, the difficulty of our position is obvious. Whether the two coalitions are white Christians versus everyone else or white Protestants and devout Catholics versus everyone else, we always remain the "everyone else.' Our coalition is an amalgamation of minorities, while their coalition represents the national ethnic and religious plurality. It is precisely because we are a diverse amalgamation of minorities that we are more anti-them than we are pro-anything else. Being anti-them is inherently our unifying theme--it is the only thing that keeps us together. They can have a coherent agenda because they represent a fairly monolithic constituency. We do not even come close to representing anything remotely monolithic, including a "nurturing parent" view of the world. When we actually stop and take stock of who we are, it becomes pretty obvious that we already have a unifying message. We do not like, nor do we agree, with the worldview put forth by the vast majority white protestants, especially the worldview of those on the reactionary religious right. We are anti-them. We do not have a unifying worldview to counter that worldview, and in fact we may never have one. Instead, we have around fifty different alternatives that we believe deserve a chance. This is probably going to make it impossible for us to develop any "new unifying message," but just in case we can come close we should at least keep working on it. We cannot hope, through some new faith based message and/or faith based candidates, to take a significant bite out of the national religious and ethnic plurality that Republicans currently represent. They are simply too good at it, and have worked too many years at it, for us to realistically expect to be able to peel away a significant number of white Protestants. We will have about as much success trying to do that as Republicans would if they tried to peel away noticeable numbers of African-Americans from our coalition. We might get two or three percent, but generally it ain't gonna happen. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. While we should not hope to develop the same level of unifying message and religious appeal that Republicans have spent decades cultivating, we do have other options. Specifically, we do have the option of completely boxing them into their current worldview, while simultaneously tarnishing the public perception of that worldview. This is exactly what Republicans have done to our coalition for decades, by pumping up the anti-black, anti-gay, anti-secular, anti-jewish, and, most recently, anti-Muslin rhetoric that has tipped minority after minority into our coalition while simultaneously, and more rapidly, increasing their own share of the national ethnic and religious plurality. In 2000, Bush nearly won a super-majority among Muslims, but in 2004 he won less than 15%. However, Republicans managed to make up more ground than they lost in forfeiting the Muslim vote by fueling the fires of anti-Muslin bigotry among the national religious and ethnic plurality. In the sixties, when Nixon, in the "original Southern Strategy," began to demonizing African-Americans, our coalition gained blacks but lost southern whites in droves. Republicans did the same thing with rural voters by developing a culture war narrative, accurately described by Thomas Frank, which is rife with anti-Semitism. They are now in the process of making up the ground they are rapidly losing among Secularist voters by bringing in devout Catholics. The only minority they stopped demonizing are Latinos because, well, Latinos tend to be devout Catholics. What I am hinting at here, and it is certainly not the nicest or most progressive thing I have ever written, is engaging in a strategy to demonize the religious right in the same way Republicans have demonized liberalism. As a recent diary at Dailykos concerning the demographics of national religious belief points out, we can do this and get away with it. Less than one-quarter of the country is actually a part of the cultural warrior religious right. We label them theocrats. We label them homophobes (and yes, we can and should use the word homophobe). We label them anti-freedom. We label them out of touch with our values. We do this because they are these things. We could label them as terrorists, because as lot of them are. We could label them corporate socialists, because they are. We label them regional bigots, because they are. We should label them anti-American, because they are, and because they have done the same to us. We destroy conservatism itself by defining it as being a member of the reactionary religious right. We tarnish the notion of being conservative to the entire nation. We trap all conservatism inside the reactionary right-wing ideology of the Christian Coalition with a permanent campaign that seeks to define that ideology as negative to the vast majority of the country that does not hold that ideology (it doesn't). Thus, our amalgamation of minorities will become the mainstream, while their homogenized national plurality becomes fringe. As they continue to solidify and homogenize their base (with the exception of Latinos), we attack them precisely for being homogeneous. That is our unifying theme: anti-reactionary religious right, but pro-freedom, pro-good works, and pro-American. We drive a wedge straight into their coalition, and watch in delight as every libertarian Republican in sight comes over to our side. We decrease their already small share of minorities even further and humiliate them for their bigoted homogeny. We define and tarnish conservatism, and make our natural unifying theme that we are not them. Wow, I almost feel dirty just for writing that, but I think it is what has to be done. I can't wait to see the comments on this one.

Where do we go from here?

Posted by simon at November 5, 2004 12:19 PM

Thank you for your many calls, emails and posts these past few days. It is clear that many feel that these days, months and years ahead are critical ones for Democrats.

This debate about where we are going as Democrats is not a new one for members of our community. Planning and investing in a better and more modern party has been NDN's central mission these past eight years.

Since we've written and spoken so much about this subject for so long, we feel it best to use NDN as a central hub for this conversation in the days ahead. Here, on our blog you will find a new central thread so you read can what others are thinking, and we're posting interesting things we're finding each day. So keep coming back each day to find more, and feel free to weigh in with your thoughts, or suggest other things to read.

Below we provide links to some of most interesting pieces we've read so far, and I've also included links to some of the most important things we've published here at NDN.

So, keep the faith. We've received a tough but not fatal blow. We lost by a single state, not a landslide. We've begun to make the long-term investments needed to take on the modern Republican Party, this information-age Tammany Hall. And despite our anguish this week, we know that the answers we provided this election to our national security, economic, fiscal and health care challenges were simply better than what the Republican Party offered. Their vision is still not best for America, and despite the outcome, 55 million Americans agreed.

But we know in our hearts we must do better. We must have a clearer and more compelling vision for our country and the American people. We must have better and more mechanisms to communicate our vision, agenda and values directly to the American people. We must become more comfortable with the very idea that making our case effectively about our collective future is the highest order of our politics, and that all else is secondary. And we must, for once and for all, accept that the Republican/conservative argument is a real and powerful one, and for today, is trumping ours in the great marketplace of ideas that is Democracy.

Like you, I know that our path is a better one. That is why I am not sad, or despairing this week. I am excited that our Party is finally looking at our political situation honestly, and squarely. And with that insight we have begun to make the changes necessary to take on the great conservative message machine that has become such a powerful force in the life of our great nation.

Thank you for all that you are doing for NDN and the country. Rest up, think, blog, read these next few weeks. Come January we will have a lot of work that needs doing and will need your commitment, passion and support to continue our fight to restore the promise of America.

Why We Lost, The New York Times, by Andrei Cherny

51-48, The New Republic, Editorial

Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, The New York Times Magazine, by Matt Bai

Fighting for the Soul of the Democrats, Time Magazine, by
Joe Klein

The Future of Progressive Politics, New Democrat Network, by Simon Rosenberg

The DNC and $100 Revolution, New Democrat Network, by Simon Rosenberg

Meeting the Conservative Challenge, New Democrat Network, by Simon
Rosenberg

A Commitment to Hope and Progress, NDN's Agenda for the First Decade of the 21st Century