Youth To Power by Michael Connery

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Excerpts from Youth To Power:How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority

from Chapter 4: The [dot]org Boom

It is probably difficult for a young person getting involved in politics today to imagine that just five years ago, a growing progressive youth movement did not exist. Time travel back to 2003,and youth involvement in progressive politics typically meant lick-ing stamps and phone-banking for a campaign, working twelve hour days canvassing street corners for an operation like the Fund for Public Interest Research, or, if you were lucky enough to have wealthy and generous parents, taking on an unpaid internship in Washington D.C. Today, while there are still economic and geo-graphic barriers to taking full advantage of the new infrastructure,if someone is motivated enough, it is easy to find multiple opportunities in progressive youth politics. For those who are less traditionally inclined and not looking to join a “political” group,there are organizations like Head Count that specialize in cultural outreach, and social clubs like Drinking Liberally. And for those who are looking to hop on the career track, opportunities in progressive politics are no longer limited to joining the blue blazer crowd jockeying for insider jobs in Washington.

This change in the culture of progressive youth politics is the result of a dramatic five-year shift in how young voters relate to both the Democratic Party and the progressive movement as a whole. This shift did not come out of nowhere, but is the end result of the work of thousands of activists, insiders and regular people—so-called “social entrepreneurs”—who have reshaped what it means to participate in progressive politics. Tired of the Democrats lying down before the Republicans on issue after issue,and seeing no real leadership among traditional political youth groups, these individuals worked to build their own progressive countermovement, in the process creating what is know as the “[dot] Org Boom,” an explosion of organizations founded by and for young people.

This boom can be broken down into three distinct stages. The initial phase began in 2003 and lasted through the 2004 election and was characterized by outsiders crashing the political gates (a parallel movement to what was happening at the time in the blogosphere), an embrace of peer-to-peer outreach tactics, and a desire to make political engagement culturally relevant to a new generation of voters.

The second phase, lasting from 2005 to 2006, was a mini-bust followed by a regrouping. During this phase, many organizations that had helped launch the initial movement faded away,either due to the disappointing conclusion to the 2004 election or the withdrawal of funds by donors looking to reassess their investments. This second phase was also marked by the increasing professionalization of the movement through the influx of DC insiders and organizations and a divvying up of the movement into various “sectors” that mirrored progressive funding analyses of the conservative movement.

Today, deep into the 2008 campaign cycle, we are entering the third phase of the [dot] Org Boom. What will emerge as the defining characteristics of this stage are still largely undefined,though it is likely to be marked by increasing localization and the adoption of new technologies. These trends can already be seen in the growth of state-based youth organizations, the formation of Students for Barack Obama, which rose to prominence through its use of FaceBook to grow a student army for Senator Obama’s presidential campaign, and in the changing giving patterns of major donors, who will have an outsized influence on how this third phase unfolds.

2003 – 2004: Rise of The Social Entrepreneurs Funding the Movement

The rapid growth of the progressive youth movement since 2003 has relied disproportionately on a small handful of donors who took what many political insiders perceived to be a large (and traditionally fruitless) risk on young voters. Chief among these donors were Andy and Deborah Rappaport, a Silicon Valley couple who made their fortune from venture capital, and Peter Lewis and his son Jonathan, long-time philanthropists whose fortune came from their ownership of, ironically, Progressive Insurance.

As founders of the Bay Area Democrats, a group that connects local Democratic constituencies in the San Francisco Bay Area to both candidates and the larger national Party, the Rappaports were long familiar with the ins and outs of Democratic Party politics. However, by 2003, the couple had grown weary of dumping cash into the same failed strategies that paid the same consultants to lose election after election. Looking at the Democratic Party to which they’d contributed so much, what they saw was a consultant class that had narrowed its focus to smaller and more specific constituencies—soccer moms, NASCAR dads—in repeated at-tempts to squeak out marginal victories over the Republicans. The results—a Republican President and Congress—spoke for itself.

Rather than throw good money after bad and bankroll another micro-targeted Democratic defeat, the Rappaports decided that their money might best be spent in an effort to expand the universe of Democratic voters. Young voters were the logical choice,as the sheer size of the youth demographic made them an attractive target, and the Democratic Party had long ceased making any serious attempts to reach out to them with a partisan message. At the time, young people were beginning to demonstrate a strong distaste for George Bush and the war in Iraq, and the Rappaports saw in this the potential to revitalize the progressive youth movement to a degree unseen since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Armed with the philosophy of helping “1,000 flowers bloom,” the Rappaports went in search of young people who were running political organizations or pitching new ideas for partisan youth outreach. To aid in this work, the couple created Skyline Public Works to provide administrative support to the Rappaport Family Foundation, the giving arm of the Rappaport’s progressive funding infrastructure. In addition, the couple also created the Band of Progressives, an informal network of donors that met over dinners to discuss how best to invest their money in progressive causes. Modeled on the Band of Angels, a Silicon Valley group that funds tech startups, the meetings of the Band of Progressives eventually moved beyond the Bay Area, sprouting all over the country and becoming a place for eager donors and youth organizers (among other progressive operatives looking to finance a start-up project) to connect. For the donors, these meetings provided a glimpse into the world of youth organizing and entrepreneurial politics, and for the youth groups, it provided an opportunity to diversify their funding base, scale their operations upwards, find financial stability, or even start up a new organization.

Unlike the Rappaports, the Lewis family was less familiar with politics. Long known as high-level donors to various charitable and nonprofit institutions like the Guggenheim Museum and Princeton University, Peter and Jonathan’s interest in politics increased as they both grew more disturbed with the Bush presidency. Late in 2003, they began to look for ways to invest in partisan Democratic politics, and like the Rappaports, they found their way to young voters.

Upon examining the playing field, the Lewis’s discovered that while there were many organizations conducting non-partisan outreach to young voters, there was almost no progressive outreach aimed at youth, and few progressive donors working with youth organizations. Despite warnings from establishment consultants that the youth vote was a waste of resources, the Lewis’s decided to invest the necessary resources to staff, evaluate and refine efforts at youth outreach. This last piece—refinement, or accountability—was of particular importance, as many of the organizations funded by the Lewis’s in 2004 rigorously documented their work,and that documentation was later used in a quantitative analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of youth outreach. Combined with research done by academics Alan Gerber and Donald Green and the field work of the New Voters Project, these studies would pro-vide the data to convince a reluctant establishment of the wisdom of investing in young voters.

All told, the Lewis and Rappaport families spent almost $10 million on young voter outreach in 2004. In general, the Lewis’s invested in two areas: organizations aimed at young people of color—a rarity in the realm of progressive youth funding—and in the revitalization of existing organizations like the Young Democrats. By contrast, the Rappaports adopted a much riskier venture capital model to their giving, investing in many organizations that operated far outside the realm of Democratic or even progressive politics. One of the first and largest investments made by the couple was in a cultural outreach start-up called Music for America.

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from Chapter 5: Rebuilding the Democratic Brand

While a rowdy group of entrepreneurial outsiders were busy building their own progressive youth movement from the ground up, no less significant a revolution was occurring within the two major youth-oriented structures that exist within the Democratic Party, the Young Democrats of America, and the College Democrats of America. Unlike the explosion of funding and organizing that has occurred within the [dot] Org Boom since 2004, the changes within the Democratic Party have come slowly,and have met with only partial success, as YDA has thrived, while CDA has continued to flounder.

One of the oldest Democratic youth organizations in the United States, the College Democrats of America were originally founded in 1932 to assist the presidential campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From its founding up until the 1960s, CDA was the largest student political organization in the nation. Because of its opposition to the war in Vietnam, however, the group’s funding was cut off and the organization was cast out of the Party by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. As a result, CDA struggled for the next two decades, until it gained the support of then Senator Al Gore in the late 1980s and enjoyed a small resurgence that lasted through the 1992 election.

In spite of this brief resurgence, for over forty years, CDA has barely registered on the cultural radar of young progressives. With an annual budget in the low to mid tens of thousands of dollars (compared to the millions available to the College Republicans), little ability to move bodies or messages on campus, and little respect from the Democratic National Committee, CDA has long been an underfunded and ineffective organization, existing mainly to provide networking opportunities and face time with politicians for young people looking to build a career in politics, as well as providing political cover for the DNC whenever it wants to seem friendly to young voters. By 2000,involved in an internal fight to impeach its president, and $30,000 in debt, the CDA had become a defunct organization in all but name.

Since its founding, also in 1932, the Young Democrats of America have hardly been much better, as the organization has been used primarily as a social club for aspiring party leaders and state chairs, who have used the group mainly for networking and socializing, and occasionally as a resource when bodies were needed to fill a room or work at a fundraiser. Like CDA, expectations for what the organization could accomplish on its own were low, and not without reason. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the organization even hired an Executive Director (CDA did not hire their first ED until 2002), and like the College Democrats, the ED was housed within, and its budget controlled, by the DNC.5

Under the “leadership” of CDA and YDA, the Democratic brand among young voters floundered for decades, reaching its nadir in 2003 when an increasing number of young voters chose to self identify as independents rather than align themselves with the Democratic Party, and progressive activists who should have formed the core of CDA and YDA, instead focused their activities outside of the party.

The Breakup

Starting in 2000, the directions of the Young Democrats of America and the College Democrats of America began to diverge. Be-cause of CDA’s debt—accumulated because the organization was doing no fundraising and barely receiving any monetary support from the DNC—and the organization’s internal turmoil, YDA became the vehicle of choice for the Democratic Party’s youth outreach efforts during the 2000 election cycle. With a budget of about $40,000, YDA executed a limited state-based strategy that included literature drops and paid ads in college papers and on student radio. While it was not a great strategy, and the organization lacked control over many of its staffers, who were housed within and partially paid for by the state parties, for the first time in recent memory YDA actually had some control over its ground game during a Presidential cycle. This was a radical departure from the organization’s usual role, which typically consisted of funneling bodies to local campaigns, where they would be used for manual labor, and GOTVing older voters. More than anything, it gave YDA’s leadership a taste of what it would be like to control the strategic direction of their organization independent of the DNC.7

In 2002, the Young Democrats found themselves in need of a new Executive Director, and what should have been a simple change in leadership turned into a power struggle between the DNC and YDA. The Young Democrats wanted to hire Alexandra Acker, a rising leader who had experience working with young voters, to implement a peer-to-peer field plan. The DNC, under the direction of Gail Stoltz, the organization’s Political Director, was pushing for Simone Ward, an operative from Missouri who had more political savvy than Acker—and connections to the African American caucus within the DNC—but less experience with young voters. While Terry McAuliffe, the head of the DNC at the time, was supportive of YDA, he was unwilling to go against Stoltz, with whom the decision rested. While YDA was firm in its belief that Acker was the best candidate for the position, since the organization was still tied financially to the DNC, it was unwilling to risk its existence on her candidacy. In the end, YDA gave in and Ward became their new Executive Director.

The DNC’s youth plan for the 2002 election, called “Youth to the Booth,” was really little more than a media campaign that involved sending Congressional officials and candidates to college campuses for photo-ops, and printing up a few thousand bumper stickers. There was little money or staff behind the program, and nothing that resembled an effective field plan to turn out young voters. Worst of all, the program took away the minimal strategic independence and budget that YDA had enjoyed during the 2000 election. Despite Ward’s push for the program, most of YDA’s leadership and member base rebelled. Instead of supporting Youth to the Booth, the national leadership made a number of small grants (between $500 and $1,000) to the state chapters and al-lowed them to determine their own battle plan.

Strategically at odds with the leadership of the DNC, many within YDA began to think that the organization would be better served if it became an independent entity. As much as this decision was wise from a strategic standpoint, it was ultimately financial concerns that drove YDA out of the Democratic Party.

By 2002, bipartisan campaign finance reform had become a major issue in politics, limiting the amount of money that campaigns and committees could collect. If YDA had stayed with the DNC, the new campaign finance rules would have required that the organization became a federal committee and therefore split all of its money from donors with the DNC—likely shrinking what was already a small budget to begin with. Additionally,at that time, the DNC was strapped for cash, and history had shown that whenever the DNC budget was cut, youth programs were always first on the chopping block. Therefore,there was no guarantee that YDA would continue to receive the same (meager) support from the DNC that it was already receiving.

The alternative was to reform YDA as a 527 non-federal political action committee, which would allow the organization to raise unlimited amounts from donors. The tradeoff under this strategy was that the organization would need to sever all financial ties to the DNC and would no longer be able to endorse candidates. Neither of these was much of a burden, as YDA had already made a strategic choice to message around the Democratic brand rather than endorse individual candidates, and the organization wasn’t receiving enough monetary or strategic support from the DNC to make it worth their while to stay. The only real loss would be YDA’s office space at the DNC, and the Party’s contributions to staff overhead costs.

After the 2002 election, the YDA executive committee voted to sever all financial coordination with the DNC, and on December 31, 2002, the group became a non-federal 527 committee. While YDA did manage to retain its seats on the DNC executive committee, as well as its status as the official youth arm of the Democratic Party, legally and financially, it was now its own organization, forced to cover its own budget, but free to pursue whatever strategies it deemed best for reaching young voters. In retrospect, this was a smart move, as after the passage of campaign finance reform, the DNC, as expected, cut its youth budget.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and the soundness of YDA’s deci-sion was not immediately apparent, as 2003 was a lean year for the newly independent organization. While the group had received $50,000 in seed money from the DNC and was able to engage in some successful fundraising, the money the organization was taking in barely kept up with costs. Against this backdrop, YDA held its bi-annual election in 2003 and elected Chris Gallaway as President, who inherited an organization with just $15,000 in the bank. Despite these struggles, the organization was now independent and could chart its own course, which would serve it well in 2004, when it would hook into the new pool of donors that were seeding the progressive youth movement.

The College Democrats, who had chosen to remain with the DNC rather than leave with YDA, did not fare so well. The group’s work continued to be hamstrung by the DNC, which provided a meager $200,000 for CDA’s entire 2004 budget,not nearly enough money to run a full-fledged field program and a laughable amount in a highly contested Presidential cycle that saw upwards of $1 billion spent. While CDA was able to use its budget to coordinate a small amount of campus activities with the Kerry campaign, and hold a large training session at the Democratic National Convention in partnership with Democratic GAIN, a grassroots training organization, the group’s efforts ultimately had little effect on the 2004 campaign.

Ultimately, CDA’s failure to contribute significantly to what youth organizers and young voters viewed as the most crucial election in years was for many a confirmation of the DNC’s total lack of interest in youth outreach, and provided justification for both YDA’s departure from the party as well as the desperate need for outside groups to get involved in working to turnout young voters.

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