So now the netroots must decide: do they obey party leaders and enthusiastically market this platform, which they might not find personally inspiring? Or not? So far, they have not. Some progressive bloggers picked the platform apart as weak; others ignored it.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERS: Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and Mark Warner lined up for an audience with the netroots crowd gathered by blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga |
Rock the (Democratic) vote
The message isn’t the only thing Democrats need to hone; they also need to learn how to convey that message to a new generation. And that’s where, some believe, the netroots can provide the greatest advantage to the Democrats, as the conservatives’ mastery and ownership of old media, and even old-fashioned organization, is losing its relevance. “I might be more mobilized by someone online, rather than someone coming to the door with a flier,” says Elana Berkowitz, editor of CampusProgress.org and manager of strategic initiatives for the Center for American Progress. “There’s a kind of authenticity to it.”For years, old-guard Democrats favored nonpartisan efforts to bolster voter participation among young adults, knowing that their party would benefit. Rock the Vote and similar programs mounted during presidential campaigns appealed to a sense of civic duty, not issues. “That didn’t work,” says Jane Fleming, executive director of Young Democrats of America. Through the 2000 campaign, “voting declined.”
Fleming credits the 2004 gains in young-adult voter turnout to the chucking of nonpartisanship. Today’s netroots-driven youth-oriented outreach, from Hip-Hop Action Summit Network to the National Organization for Women, focuses on how political participation can affect progressive issues; their partisanship is either thinly disguised or worn right on their sleeves.
Turns out, most young adults already agree with the Democrats’ basic philosophy — they just don’t always identify that philosophy with the Democrats. Liberals don’t need to convince them about the wisdom of progressive taxation, public-safety nets, environmental protection, energy independence, affordable health-care coverage for everyone, corporate regulation, and clean elections. They need to tell young people what the Democrats can do to advance these issues, and how the Republicans seek to undermine them.
“It’s not about convincing somebody who doesn’t know who to vote for,” says Riccobono of Swing the State.
Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute (NPI) in Washington, DC, has been studying the “Millennial Generation” — born between 1978 and 1993 — and says that they’ll get their political information and motivation via new media: blogs, text messaging, podcasting, RSS feeds, MySpace, and YouTube, for example.
And, Leyden says, they are much more progressive, civic-minded, and engaged than their Gen-X and baby-boom predecessors. They take for granted ideas like gender equality, environmentalism, and civil rights. “Their personality bodes extremely well for progressives in politics,” Leyden says.
Democrat Allan Lichmann, US Senate candidate in Maryland, has more than 3000 MySpace friends. Nearly 100 videos on YouTube promote Senate candidate Ned Lamont. A San Francisco billboard urges people to “Text IVOTE to 80837” to register to vote.
