Rock the Vote is considered part of the progressive civic engagement space, as young voters tend to be progressive and Democratic. It is the 800 pound guerrilla of voter mobilization for young people and sucks up money from Foundations and big dollar donors. Late last year, Rock the Vote signed a deal with AT&T to work together. I brought up AT&T's record of wiretapping and fighting against net neutrality with Heather Smith, the director of Rock the Vote, and she assured me that the company met progressive certain criteria. AT&T actually has a good record on labor rights, so I assumed that's what she meant.
Today, I learned that Rock the Vote signed a deal with Comcast. Comcast is a wiretapping fiend, actually filters their network (as opposed to AT&T), owns content it wants to distribute, AND is one of the biggest union busters around. Rock the Vote has a long history of corporate sponsorships, and often these sponsorships prevent it from really engaging with youth voters with anything but a cursory media oriented relationship. I have limited knowledge of the organization, but it seems like that's what's happening this year, again.
Money tends to be a statement of priorities. And while the Democrats might look divided, the fundraising cycle is just horrible for the GOP. It's not just John McCain's poor numbers. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is in even worse shape than previously understood.
As the National Republican Congressional Committee last week released the first details of the accounting scandal involving former Treasurer Christopher Ward, the committee's top official also asserted for the first time that the debt left over from the 2006 elections was actually in the range of $19 million.
NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.) had previously said that the committee's debt from last cycle was about $16 million, even though the highest amount reported to the Federal Election Commission was $14.5 million.
That's outright fraud, which cuts at the trust large donors have in the committee. And frankly, this could be more widespread in the GOP than it appears, as Ward was the treasurer for multiple committees.
The commitments from participating organizations, who have banded together to "Take Back America" --
AFL-CIO - $50M program, targeting labor households, of course
Women's Voices Women's Vote Action Fund - $30M, targeting single women
National Council of La Raza - Democracia USA -- $4M - $6M
ACORN - $35M, targeting households in communities of color
Rock the Vote - $10M
Move On - $30M
The groups' effort will be supplemented by related PAC activity -- to the tune of $200M
And Change To Win - $100M
Todd Beeton explores this with this excellent post. I expect that McCain's favorables among union members - which right now are quite high - will decline as members hear from their union that McCain voted against overtime pay, against the minimum wage, and for the far right-wing economic agenda. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win budgets will see to that.
Rock the Vote and Women's Voices Women's Vote are both substantially ramped up. WVWV is a remarkable organization with a proven model tackling an immense civic challenge: the large number of unregistered single women. I would expect districts that have lots of them to shift their voter universe and makeup quite substantially, so any budding demographers that want to figure out where the single unregistered women are located will have a leg up in understand which districts and states will be better pickup opportunities. I don't yet understand Rock the Vote's strategy, but the youth space is exploding with innovation.
Moveon's budget is not substantially larger than it was in 2006, but they have become more effective at using their members for phone banking and GOTV. It's a pretty impressive set of outside actors, frankly, and one that has gotten better and better at working together over the last six years.
So CNN reported a story that is just wrong. Watch the video here and I wanted to go through and talk about all of the points that Carol Costello raises.
But first let me say that I am so exhausted from this kind of crap. It is so ridiculous that today reporters won't use the valid information they can get from a simple google search. There is no excuse for this kind of reckless journalism. It makes me think that perhaps it isn't that they get it wrong its that they WANT to report a specific story about young people and they want to fit the research to that story.
What a lot of people don't understand is that when you get stats like this wrong - it impacts campaigns, consultants, and candidates. It makes them think that they should not be targeting young people.
When they don't target young people they don't get young people to go out and vote.. so it perpetuates the fallacy.
Further it makes candidates have to get more republicans to vote for them which influences their policy. So basically, they have to be more conservative in their votes and the bills they push because they think that is representative of their district... when in reality... it might not be.
These things impact us at levels that go beyond turnout and elections it goes to the very laws that we are passing and the votes cast in Congress.
I've been playing around with this new widget from Rock the Vote, which lets anyone create their own voter registration program, kind of like Actblue for voter registration. It's potentially groundbreaking, and you can sign up here. Here's a screenshot of the backend.
Cross-posted at Future Majority If we get a good discussion going, I will forward this post on to the Rock the Vote staff.
.The big news in the youth movement this week is that the old man of the Youth Vote - Rock the Vote - just merged with its studious younger sibling, Young Voter Strategies. Together, the two organizations will combine "the best components of YVS's research and outreach with Rock the Vote's long history of work to build political power for young adults." This is something that's been in the works for quite a while. Now that it has finally come to fruition, I'm left hoping for the best, but still asking a lot of questions.
Young Voter Strategies made a name for itself by rigorously investigating and documenting the most effective methods for reaching young voters and then promoting their findings to campaigns and the media. It's thanks in part to their work that so many Presidential campaigns now have full-time youth outreach staff that sit high up in the field department. It's due in part to their work that even down-ticket campaigns are devising youth outreach strategies and investing their resources in mobilizing young people. For the last few years, YVS has preached the value of peer to peer outreach and the importance of field work.
Yet Rock the Vote is primarily a media organization. In 1992 the organization accomplished an incredible amount by combining field work and a media campaign. 1992 was the first year the youth vote saw a significant increase since 1972. There were a lot of factors at work - an unusually competitive Presidential race (this was the year of Ross Perot) and strong work from the National Campaign for Student Voter Registration and the Student Environmental Action Coalition - but much of the success of that year can be attributed to Rock the Vote's combined media and field strategy. Since then, the field program has atrophied and media has become the primary focus of the organization. Indeed, this is the primary criticism I hear about the organization from ex-staff, youth organizers, and my peers who grew up with Rock the Vote as the only voice in the political debate that even tried to appeal to normal folks (read: non political junkies). Rather than create a culture of activism - or teach people to Live Liberally as we say around here - Rock the Vote devolved into a mechanism to sell young people a product: voting.
To be clear, this isn't at all to say that Rock the Vote hasn't had successes in recent times, or that it won't do good work in 2008. In 2004, 1.2 million people downloaded registration forms from their website. 75% of those people actually followed-through and registered, and 79% of those folks turned out at the polls. Those are good numbers. With their new online vote registration widget, they stand to make some substantial gains in online registration in 2008.
But what happens when you bring these two very different organizations together?
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