Gov. Lingle of Hawaii, amazingly, still hasn't made a decision on whether to sign or veto a same-sex civil unions bill that passed several weeks ago. If she plans to veto, she has until June 21 to announce it, and until July 6 to actually sign it, veto it, or let it become law without her signature.
According to a University of Washington poll, 74% of Tea Party supporters say they agree with the following statement: "While equal opportunity for blacks and minorities to succeed is important, it's not really the government's job to guarantee it."
And 52% agree with the statement "compared to the size of their group, lesbians and gays have too much political power." Overstatement of the year.
Want to go to the Netroots Nation? If you're a marriage equality activist, OpenLeft and Freedom to Marry is offering 3 scholarships (travel + hotel + registration) to the best out there. I wrote up some of what we're looking for here, and the deadline to apply is coming up- Monday, June 7th. Applications can be submitted here.
I don't usually like Peter Beinart's stuff, but he has a really excellent piece on Zionism and how the next generation views it (it's from a few weeks back but I just found time to read it today). I 100% fit into the focus group demographic Luntz describes at the beginning of the piece.
Washington City Paper has a good cover story on the DC Voting Rights Act and some backstory on what ended up happening with the NRA screwing it over at the end when it looked like there would be a compromise. As one friend on the board of DC Vote put it to me, they essentially wanted everything except making it law that every newborn leaves the hospital with a Social Security card and a gun. I wanted that bill passed badly, but as a resident, considering the scope of what the NRA wanted, I realize lives are more important than one more vote in Congress. So the right decision was made here, and we'll just have to keep working.
Rep. Chellie Pingree from the coastal state of Maine blogs on why BP should pay royalties on the legislation oil they spill, not just that which they recover, refine and sell (current law). The royalties would be used to finance clean ocean-based energy projects. Her office tells me she plans to introduce legislation on the topic.
Chellie and Rep. Honda also just started the New Media Working Group of the House Dem Caucus, in an effort to make sure the Democrats never have a Ted "series of tubes" Stevens in their caucus. In all seriousness, I participated in a "speed dating" event with 5 other blogfolk last year, attended by about 60 House Dem communications directors and press secretaries. It was fascinating. I would say 8/10 people who rotated at my table didn't understanding of how to work with bloggers or online activists in general, and I bet a fair number didn't have a sound grasp of how to engage Twitter or other new media tools. Hopefully this will help.
There's been a lot of discussion about this McDonald's gay-themed ad, which is running in France until June 21st.
I actually think it's very positive for the community. A number of colleagues of mine disagree. What do you think?
A new poll from KCCI TV in Iowa shows that for what I believe is the first time, a majority of Iowans support the freedom to marry for same-sex couples- 53% in favor with 41% opposed. I am ever more interested in how this will play out in the 2012 Republican primaries. I'll even go so far as to bet that one of the candidate will get their pander machine running when an adviser tells them it's the "sleeper issue" to winning Iowa, and he/she comes out in favor of the freedom to marry.
Over at The Bilerico Project, Bil Browning has a 3-part series looking at the fairly new LGBT activist group, GetEqual (known best for chaining themselves to the White House fence, interrupting Obama at the Boxer fundraiser, disrupting a House Ed and Labor Committee hearing, etc.) New Managing Director Heather Cronk, formerly of New Organizing Institute, has responses up. I have mixed feelings on GetEqual, and probably will write a longer piece about all that sooner or later. True to that, I think there are some fair points and counterpoints on both sides. You can find all of the pieces so far here.
One of my pet peeves as a new media consultant is that many campaigns and organizations possess a Harry Potter style belief in how new media operates. The belief goes something like this:
Hire someone who works in new media;
Person just hired in new media waves magic wand;
Something amazing happens to benefit the campaign.
This is frustrating because it views new media as a magical realm that is the province of a few magical people who can somehow produce massive, tangible benefit to a campaign without any resources being invested in their efforts. In reality, new media requires significant investment of money and manpower to get an appropriate return on that investment.
The subject of this post is another one of my pet peeves: the very similar belief among election observers about the magical nature of field campaigns. This belief goes as follows:
Polling shows a candidate tied, or down a couple points;
The candidate has a strong filed campaign;
The candidate will defy polling and win due to strong field campaign
Salon's war room offers up an example of this belief in their discussion of the Pennsylvania Senate primary today:
Obama's absence from the state means the race will probably just come down to whichever side has the stronger ground game. Polls have it virtually deadlocked (though one new one out Thursday had Sestak winning by nine points). Vice President Biden may still return before Tuesday. A close election that hinges on turnout could favor Specter, who's got several big unions plus the powerful Philadelphia Democratic apparatus on his side.
This is a nonsensical, Harry Potter style belief. It is also very widespread--I am not just picking on Salon here, just using a relevant news item as an example.
Have the mobilization efforts of the unions, Organizing for America, and the Philadelphia Democratic party somehow escaped the results of public opinion surveys to date? Of course not. The efforts of those groups to persuade voters and make them more likely to vote are already included in the public opinion surveys measuring the Pennsylvania Senate primary (which, on average, give Sestak a narrow lead).
Field campaigning does not operate in a different plane of non-muggle existence from other forms of voter contacts (paid media, free media, new media). Field campaigning is also not excluded from polling. Voters who have been contacted by phone calls, yard signs, or by person to person canvassing on the ground, are, just like all other voters, contacted by pollsters. The likelihood of these voters turning up to the polls is, just like all other voters, also measured by pollsters.
Polls measure the strength and effectiveness of field campaigns to date, as polls measure the strength and effectiveness of all campaigning through the date when the poll was conducted. The only way that a strong field campaign could surprise polls would be if that field campaign spent a disproportionate amount of its resources after the last public opinion survey had concluded its interviews. However,t his can be said of any aspect of a campaign, not just field. If a campaign spends disproportionate resources on television ads after the final poll was conducted, or one that manages to score a particularly good news cycle after the final poll was conducted, then the final poll will not measure the effectiveness of that aspect of the campaign, either.
For an example of how polling already measures the strength of field campaigns, look no further than the 2008 Presidential election. The final 15-day simple mean of national polls in 2008 showed Barack Obama ahead by 7.44% (across 61 polls, scroll to the link at the bottom). The final 2008 results gave Obama a 7.27% victory in the national popular vote. Few would dispute that the gap in quality between the field operations of the Obama and McCain campaign s was one of the highest ever in a Presidential election, with the decisive edge going to Obama. And yet, this advantage did not translate into an improvement for Obama from the final polls to the final result. This is because the strength of field operations, as is the strengthen of all aspects of a campaign, are measured by public opinion surveys.
The belief that field operations can produce a hidden vote polls are missing simply does not make any sense. Such a belief may serve as a comfort --or as a fear-based motivating tactic-- to steel the nerves of supporters of one candidate or another, but it is not supportable by either deductive reasoning or empirical observation.
Pride at Work's latest stunt infiltrating the Westin St. Francis is now a YouTube sensation, generating over 35,000 hits yesterday. It was featured on two local evening news shows, the progressive webzine Common Dreams, and the LGBT blog Towleroad - and on countless Facebook pages. But besides being a fun video, it deftly shows how activists can adapt to new ways of getting their message out. Mass rallies are much less effective today than they were in the Sixties, but too often progressives want to re-live this era by using the same tools and expecting a different result. People don't get their news from just a few channels anymore, so it's possible to have a march with thousands of people with little effect. Today, ideas catch fire and take hold through online social networks. "Caught in a Bad Hotel" was not the first YouTube flashmob, but it was the first one with a political purpose. And hopefully, it won't be the last.
Last night, just before 6:30 p.m. eastern, cloture on financial reform failed to pass the Senate, 57-41. At that time, I decided to conduct an experiment in online buzz. I opened three browser tabs on my desktop computer, each to a different twitter hastag: one for #hcr, one for #finreg, and one for #immigration. I had to step away from my computer for a few hours, and I wanted to see which subject would have more tweets during that time.
Five and a half hours later, here were the results:
So, even in the evening after the first vote on financial reform, it was unable to generate nearly as much buzz as a bill that passed into law a month ago, or as much as the next big legislative fight.
Looking beyond hastags, immigration was a trending topic in the United States yesterday. It remains one even in New York City and Washington D.C., which one would presume to be the two cities most interested in financial reform. Immigration is also a trending topic in Houston and San Francisco, although not in Los Angeles or Dallas.
On Google News, there have 41,273 stories containing the keyword "immigration" over the past week, compared to 19,608 on some iteration of "financial reform.""Health Care" dwarfs them both, at 73,344.
Last weekend, Pew found that health care was still the dominant political news story in the mind of the country. During a poll conducted from Friday April 16 to Monday April 19th, Pew found health care reform was still the most popular news story in the nation, even though it had passed into law three weeks earlier and total news coverage had fallen behind several other topics:
Some thoughts on all this:
The fight over financial reform is not capturing the attention of the grassroots and of the general public to nearly the same degree as health care reform did, and as immigration is well on its way to doing. Perhaps Harry Reid continuing to force votes will change that, as conflict does sell.
It's a reasonable assumption that the lack of coherent language around financial reform, or Wall Street reform, or bank reform, or finreg, or whatever it is called, is one of the reasons it has not captured the national attention. If you can't talk about it, it is difficult to even think about it.
Once the financial reform fight is over, and Congress moves onto immigration, this unscientific online survey suggests that there will be tremendous public engagement in that legislative scrum.
If financial reform is supposed to be a big winning issue for Democrats--as I assumed it would be--I am not feeling it yet. The public has to be engaged in a legislative fight in order for it to have a political impact, and so far that hasn't happened.
Earlier today, eight Republican members of Congress accused the SEC with filing charges against Goldman Sachs in order to help pass Wall Street reform. This makes a lot of sense, since Republicans are also accusing Democrats of helping firms like Goldman Sachs with the bill. So, Democrats are helping Goldman Sachs by filing fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, or something.
Like most right-wing conspiracy theories, this charge instantly gained a large following within right-wing media.
For example, the editorial board of wingnut The Washington Times immediately jumped on board, and began writing a story about the DNC possibly purchasing Google Ads on Goldman Sachs fraud charges before the charges were brought. Unfortunately for The Washington Times, this story was based on an extremely poor understanding of how Google advertising works, and the DNC was able to play a joke on the Times as a result. Ben Smith:
An editorial writer for the Washington Times called DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan, Sevugan says, earlier this afternoon to ask when, exactly, the DNC had purchased the search terms, "Goldman SEC." The writer was checking out a theory -- current on the right -- that Democrats had bought ads against the terms "Goldman" and "SEC" before the Securities and Exchange Commission's charges were made public.
The theory depends on it taking quite a bit of time for Google's ad words program to make its way through the system, as the DNC says it bought the ads right after news of the charges broke Friday.
Its pretty funny stuff, but in a way it also makes me sad. It is a bummer that all Republicans don't have such a hideous understanding of how Google Ads, and other aspects of new media, work. For example, back in February, when Evan Bayh announced his retirement, Pat Toomey's campaign immediately began purchasing ads on searches for Evan Bayh. While perhaps this was due to a conspiracy between Pat Toomey's staff and Evan Bayh to collect a few dozen emails for Pat Toomey's list, more likely it was that Toomey didn't hire people ignorant of new media for his campaign. Too bad the Washington Times can't say the same.
Today is the end of the first fundraising quarter for candidates for federal office. By April 15th, all candidates for federal office, as well as all federal PACs, have to disclose how much cash they have on hand, how much they raised from January 1st through March 31st, and what expenditures they made.
In an attempt to make themselves appear more viable to party committees, to media outlets, and to other donors, candidates try to rack up as many donations as possible on the last day of the quarter. With email now such an essential part of campaign fundraising to a huge deluge of political fundraising emails today. For some perspective, at 1:30 p.m. Today, eastern, Brandon English tweeted that he had already received 53 email fundraising asks today:
Now 53 end-of-quarter emails in my inbox today. Most popular subject lines are "Midnight" and "X hours to go". Give to your fav Dems today!
Now, Brandon works on new media for the DCCC, so he might be on more of these candidate email lists than anyone in the country. He also clearly isn't bothered by the deluge.
However, with literally hundreds of campaigns sending out fundraising emails today, and with many campaigns selling their email lists to other campaigns as a means of paying off campaign debt after elections are over, the signal to noise ratio for online organizers is reaching a disturbing level. I have donated to about 25 different federal campaigns since 2003, mostly in small amounts, and as a result I have received dozens of emails over the past week. Instead of reading them, these days I am pretty much just deleting them all.
While most campaigns will still make far more money over email today than they made any other day this year, the possibility of a long-term, chronic decline seems real. As more campaigns sell their lists to each other, and as campaign email lists grow larger, the usefulness of email as an activism tool can only decline on an email per email basis. And then, as individual emails become less valuable, campaign email lists might grow even larger, as they become cheaper to purchase.
Email remains at the center of new media political organizing for now, but days like today are a reminder that won't be the case forever. Eventually, social networking will replace email, since social networking groups cannot be sold and since it is much easier for an individual to choose which groups they join. This probably doesn't spell danger for large, email-based activism organizations over the next few years, but in a decade, or perhaps a little more, the declining value of email will make the basic structure of online political activism completely different than it is now.
Last week, we introduced Kenyon Farrow of Queers for Economic Justice, Calvin Williams of the Generational Alliance, and Althea Erickson of the Freelancers Union. They shared with us a brief summary of how their organizations had adopted some online tools.
This week, they delve into some of the challenges they faced along the way, and some insight into how they overcame them:
The disclaimer states "This website is neither endorsed nor approved by Harold Ford, Jr. or any of his affiliated organizations. Any content or commentary appearing herein is the sole responsibility of friends and supporters of Congressman Ford."
Yet there are blog posts signed by Harold himself dated February 10th, 7th, and 5th. No doubt Ford's supporters are re-posting his content. I guess his brilliant new media people must have realized how politically dumb the other blog on which he wrote was- you know, the one maintained by a Tennessee County Commissioner.
The site misrepresents the President of the United States. In a post dated January 21, the headline is "President Obama Says He "Needs" Harold Ford", and the URL slug is "http://www.draftford.org/2010/01/president-obama-loves-harold-ford/", yet all of the quotes are from the 2006 campaign, when Barack Obama was Senator Obama. In fact, amusingly, the fact that the URL slug is different from the post title is sometimes an indicator that whoever wrote this post saved it, then realized the original title was not quite accurate, so they changed it, but the URL slug stuck. Regardless, perhaps the White House will make it clear once again that President Obama has not endorsed Harold Ford, Jr.
Under the "Links" at the bottom right, as of this post, you may want to fix that typo, and the lack of consistency on grammar.
(Click for larger image)
There is an ask to sign a petition to draft Ford. As of this post, it has a whopping 25 signatures on it, despite, from what I hear, the site being up since back in January.
In another fun move, Ford's backers allow those who sign to choose to make their signatures public. So let's take a look. We have, as of his post, seven signed "Out of State". We also have weird ones like "Anonymous, 8, 15, 14, 16" and "Ima Hogg, 8, 14". And we have some fun joke ones, like my personal favorite, "Ukant B. Zerius".
Just in case you wanted to have some fun of your own, here's a link to the petition.
This week, we have something new for our Training Tuesday series. We still have plenty of videos left to come from Democracy for America's Campaign Academy, but a couple weekends back, we attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York. This conference was a unique opportunity for activists to learn about new media and online organizing from some of the greatest online organizers around.
Last weekend, I attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York, put together by Charles Lenchner of the Working Families Party. This conference brought people together to hear from some of the greatest minds in the online organizing world. I came out of it with lots of great footage, and today we are previewing some of it. The majority of the footage, however, will be featured in our Training Tuesday series. So check back Tuesday at 6:00pm for more Organizing 2.0 footage. We are also collecting all our Organizing 2.0 footage onto one page here. But if you are reading this, then you really should find the time to watch these videos.
This past summer, The Opportunity Agenda conducted a scan (PDF) to determine the state of immigration advocacy on the social web, looking specifically at the following: blogs that frequently cover politics and reach a mass audience, Twitter, YouTube, and the two largest social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace). This research built on a similar scan we conducted in 2007.
Turning specifically to social networking sites, we found a landscape transformed. In 2007 anti-immigrant groups dominated social networking sites approximately two to one. Today the majority of groups on Facebook with a focus on immigration support commonsense reform. MySpace, meanwhile, seems to no longer serve as an active tool for advocacy.
While the main point of our scan was to provide a snapshot of online immigration advocacy in the summer of 2009, our research did lead to a number of recommendations.
First, we wish to point out the success of DREAM Act-related groups on Facebook. Of all the immigration groups on the site, these were the most popular in terms of membership. We speculate that an important reason for this was the ability of these groups to consistently update their content and have active members routinely post information and news related to the DREAM Act. This is key. Members often need to see the vibrancy of a group before they will participate. Once they do, these members' networks see this activity and learn of the group. It is this cycle, we believe, that led to much of the success seen by these groups.
Our crude measure for participation in these groups, membership, is not uncommon. As seen by the proliferation of Facebook groups looking for "1,000,000 for..." any number of causes, it would help the movement to combine its numbers to show unity and support for practical immigration re- form. The best example, again, is the dream Act with its 33 different groups advocating for the same piece of legislation. Despite the difficulties in doing so, it would be beneficial to work toward fewer groups and higher membership rolls.
Again read the full report online for more. Meanwhile, any more tips? Let us hear them in the comments below.
If you're looking for an early bet for the top story of 2010, bet on the story being the Internet Revolution, because after years and years of anticipation and progress, the next two to three years are when we are going to see the Internet become what we all thought it would be.
The last big news from Facebook was that, were it considered a country, its population would be larger than that of all the countries in the world, save China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. (It stands at 200 million.)
Diving into those demographics a bit, we recently learned that what was once, by design, the exclusive domain of college students, now counts its largest age group as those 35 to 54. Remarkably, the second largest age group are those 24 to 34-year olds (25.2%).
Those of approximately college age, 18-24, come in today at 25.1%—remarkably down from 40.8% from just this past January.
This just underscores important role Facebook can play in advocacy. It reaches an astounding number of people, but looking specifically at fundraising, it's reaching those people most likely to have the means to give and not simply those in college already struggling to stretch their limited income.
As further evidence of this, the popular Facebook fundraising application, Causes, recently announced that they've raised $10 million in a little over two years. Interestingly, they've raised half of that, a full $5 million, in the past six months alone. Though it'd be very hard to report causality, this certainly corresponds to older users overtaking young college and grad school aged users as the primary users of Facebook.
Although we need to remember that Facebook doesn't reach everyone, it's increasingly becoming a more and more useful tool.
Last last week, the one millionth site was created on the social network Ning. For individuals and organizations (including nonprofits) for whom Facebook is not giving them exactly what they need, there's Ning, which allows users to build their own social network.
For an example of how nonprofits are using Ning, take a look at the site of our friends at National CAPACD, the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development.
Ning is free, with ads. The premium version gets rid of that.
To read more from The Opportunity Agenda, visit our blog.
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