Will the Youth Vote Swing This Election?

Original article By Cora Currier on The Nation.

October 17, 2008

As state deadlines pass, voter registration numbers are reaching record highs. The Associated Press estimated last week that nationwide there have been more than 9 million new registrations in the past six months, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans four to one. Get-out-the-vote groups that target young people are reporting unprecedented numbers of young voters added to the rolls. This week Rock the Vote, one of the largest nonpartisan GOTV organizations, surpassed 2.3 million registrations this election cycle.

"The numbers are staggering," said Andy Karsch, director of Rock the Vote's bus project, which has been touring around the country since September. Through its bus tour, Rock the Vote has secured more than 1 million new registrants in the past month alone. The Obama campaign would not give out specifics on the number of voters it had registered through its outreach effort, Vote for Change, but Chris Hughes, the campaign's director of online organizing, said that the website had been "hugely successful; it surpassed all our expectations. Almost everyone who came to the website followed through with the whole registration process." On a local level, a group called New Era Colorado has registered more than 11,000 voters, according to executive director Steve Fenberg. "The registration levels are enormous in Colorado," he said. "There's an excitement on the ground I've never seen before."

The number of newly registered Democrats eclipses Bush's margins of victory in swing states like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. In North Carolina Democrats have registered twice as many voters as Republicans, helping to put the state in play. A big reason is the number of new young voters, 18- to 29-year-olds who favor Obama by upwards of twenty points.

In Virginia, once a Republican bastion, the State Board of Elections had received 306,000 new voter registration applications by the end of September: 42 percent of them were from people younger than 25. In Pennsylvania the number of registered Democrats has increased by about 13 percent, thanks in part to heavy targeting of the state's large college population. Since many states' deadlines still haven't passed, the exact percentage of new registrants nationally who are under 30 won't be clear until after the election. Historically, new registrants tend to be younger, and both campaigns and nonpartisan efforts have overwhelmingly targeted the demographic.

Of course, registration is only part of the puzzle--getting voters to the polls is the ultimate goal. Yet the registration numbers thus far bode well for November. According to the US Census Bureau, only 49 percent of people ages 18 to 29 voted in 2004, but 81 percent of those who were registered voted. Even among 18- to-21-year-olds, all new voters based on their age, roughly 80 percent of registrants voted. These rates of participation among registered young voters could spell a record high turnout in terms of raw numbers this election cycle.

What's more, organizers are pointing to a number of factors that may indicate that there's real substance behind all the talk of young voters this year. For one, youth turnout rose in the 2004 and 2006 elections, and it doubled and tripled in some states' primaries in 2008, compared with 2000.

There are also the technological advancements that have served as vital communication tools in getting people registered and to the polls. GOTV groups like Rock the Vote are finding that the number of people they reach has expanded exponentially thanks to peer-to-peer networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. The Nation's Ari Melber has reported extensively on the Obama campaign's effective use of new technology to reach voters, such as utilizing text messaging and their own networking site MyBO.

"All this targeting and talk is having an effect," Fenberg said of his experience on the ground in Colorado. "People are plugged in, and we're seeing more excitement than ever."

Karsch said Rock the Vote's staff has felt the same kind of excitement. "I'd be shocked if there wasn't an unprecedented turnout," he said. "This is a transitional election, and people want to be a part of it." If the registration numbers are any indication, new young voters could change the game come November.

The Lessons of the Weather Underground

Former student radical Mark Rudd explains where he went wrong—and how young people today can learn from his mistakes.

By Te-Ping Chen | January 29, 2008 | Click here to read the original article and comments on Campus Progress.


Activist Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), addresses students at Columbia University, May 3, 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the middle of a soliloquy on the challenges of student organizing, Mark Rudd, former national secretary for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—a radical student organization that in the 1960s boasted a membership of about 100,000—surprised me. “Have you ever been in love?” he asked abruptly. Startled, I hesitantly responded, “Yes.” “Me too,” he told me. “Only I was in love with a country.”

According to Rudd, that emotion pushed him to do crazy things. Though SDS was founded in 1962 as a nonviolent organization, with race riots brewing in America’s major cities in 1969 Rudd and several other SDS leaders began agitating for militant action. They formed a militant faction, the Weathermen, which eventually renounced SDS and emerged as the radical guerilla organization the Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground set its sights on the revolutionary overthrow of the United States government. Its members preached sacrifice of privilege and solidarity with anti-racist struggles from Vietnam to America’s ghettos. As one of its leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, said, “White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.” During the 1970s, the Weather Underground staged over a dozen bombings at sites ranging from the New York police department to the Pentagon. Aside from one accidental detonation that killed three Weathermen, the group did not inflict any casualties.

Today, Rudd is unsparing in his critique of the organization he helped found. “It was juvenile, it was less than juvenile,” Rudd said. Though the Weather Underground gained rapid notoriety for its views, the group, Rudd argues, helped pave the way for the unmaking of the student left. By discarding SDS and pursuing militancy, says Rudd, the Weather Underground abandoned the basic principle of any strong political movement: a commitment to organizing. According to Rudd, this is a legacy that persists in contemporary student movements. Failure to do the hard work of organizing, Rudd said, is what continues to hold progressive students back today, even as they try to piece together new methods of political engagement.

* * *

Though Rudd is cynical about much of his tenure as a student leader, one period of time for him remains untarnished: his years at Columbia University from 1965-1968.

Growing up in New Jersey as the grandson of Jewish immigrants who believed America could do no wrong, it was a shock for Rudd when he crossed the Hudson River and came in contact with his peers’ anti-racist, anti-imperialist critique of America. Rudd watched student uprisings taking place from France to Mexico to China—the world seemed poised on the brink of global revolution, and Rudd wanted to join in.

At the time, Rudd said, SDS—including members who would become part of the Weather Underground—was defined by its commitment to base-building. Dorm-storming, canvassing and teach-ins were staples of the organization’s constant education and recruitment. “We had circles of hundreds and hundreds [of supporters], and the circles grew and grew,” said Rudd, who became Columbia's chapter chair in 1968. “That was the essence of what we were always doing: growth.”

When the Tet Offensive and assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. shocked the nation, SDS had a broad and ready base. That April, Rudd led hundreds of students in the seizure of several university buildings in the legendary 1968 Columbia strike, which eventually drew the overwhelming support of the university's students and faculty. The strike—which lasted the rest of the academic year—ignited headlines nationwide and gave rise to other campus protests under the Ché Guevara-inspired slogan, “One, two, many Columbias!” (Meanwhile, other young activists were protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an effort chronicled in the new film “Chicago 10,” which Campus Progress screened at recent events in Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C.)

After the strike, Rudd was expelled. He began traveling across the country as an SDS organizer, and became increasingly convinced of the need for further militant action. At the SDS convention the following year, Rudd and 10 other SDS members presented a paper advocating armed struggle, entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” They argued that it was the responsibility of white, middle-class youth to sacrifice their privileged positions and unite in the "Third World"'s struggle by bringing the anti-imperialist, anti-racist war to the United States.

“We thought the bolder we were, the more people would want to join us,” Rudd said.

They were wrong. In 1969, the Weathermen called for “working-class, revolutionary” youth to “fight the pigs” in Chicago on the second anniversary of Guevara’s death, an event the press expectantly dubbed the “Days of Rage.” Though Rudd and his compatriots hoped an angry mob of thousands would converge in Chicago, only several hundred showed up. The band worked diligently to create chaos, smashing windows and assaulting police officers, but the event fell far short of the apocalyptic tide of violence the Weathermen anticipated.

“That would’ve been the moment to say, hey, this isn’t working,” said Rudd, who lived for seven and a half years as a federal fugitive during his time with the Weather Underground, working menial jobs from New Mexico to New York and living under an assumed name. “Anyone logical would’ve realized. But we were idealists, and we rationalized it.” From their first radio-broadcast declaration of war to the series of ponderous communiqués the group subsequently authored, the Weather Underground continued to prefer self-expression to political action. “Our idea of organizing,” said Rudd waspishly, “was running down the street waving an NLF [Nationalist Liberation Front] flag.”

“People only get won over through person-to-person engagement, not through spectacle,” Rudd said. “But self-expression is not the same as organizing. The problem is very few people today know this simple truth.” Though the Weather Underground’s leaders’ flair for theatrics made for tantalizing media headlines (and the riveting, though conspicuously indulgent 2002 documentary The Weather Underground), their political posturing did little more than alienate the anti-war movement and give the Nixon administration further leeway to impugn the student left. And while the group tried to take on a mantle of sacrifice for America’s racially oppressed, the Black Panther Party’s Fred Hampton characterized the Weathermen as “opportunistic, individualistic, anarchistic, and Custer-istic.”

Worse still, Rudd said, their actions undermined the strength of the leftist student movement he and others had worked so hard to build. In the wake of the 1969 convention, the SDS imploded in a paroxysm of factionalism. “I’m not at all proud of that,” said Rudd, who today lives as a retired community college teacher in New Mexico. His federal charges were dropped after he surfaced in 1978—the government had used too many illegal tactics trying to track him down to successfully prosecute him.

* * *

Fast forward 40 years and the student left has yet to reclaim the power that was scattered with SDS’s demise, according to Rudd. While his generation grew up learning from the Civil Rights Movement and the labor movement, today’s youth, Rudd argues, lack instruction on how to do the hard work of person-to-person organizing. Instead, contemporary youth are left with the iconographic photos of protests from the sixties—and little understanding of the work that inspired such protests in the first place.

After all, the images of protests that arouse such nostalgia today do not reflect the realities of organizing in the 1960s, Rudd agrued. Though civil disobedience, sit-ins, and strikes received publicity, such actions were only the face of the substantive education and recruitment happening beneath the surface. At Columbia, for example, the milling masses of protestors “really only came out of four years of hard organizing,” Rudd said. “People today still don’t understand that.”

When I brought up Thomas Friedman’s “Generation Q” article—which lambasted my generation as a too-quiet political force content to voice our politics through mouse clicks—Rudd immediately latched onto the topic. With the rise of the Internet, communication tools for the contemporary generation are more accessible than ever, yet with a lack of models to turn to, the real cornerstones of movement-building are missing, Rudd argued.

So who or what should students today turn to? Read Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Rudd said. Read about Ella Baker and how she inspired people by teaching them about their own power. The key to action, Rudd argued, is organizing.

Today, high school and college students across the nation are taking that message in hand, reviving SDS and kick-starting its legacy for the 21st century. Since the group was officially re-launched in January 2006, SDS has expanded to over 100 college campuses and dozens of high schools.

Though the new SDS pays homage to its predecessor of the 1960s in name, the groups’ similarities end there. While the old SDS was structured along strict hierarchical lines, the new SDS operates as a decentralized network united by a boots-on-the-ground attitude that emphasizes local action and chapter autonomy. Chapters share an anti-war focus but remain committed to diverse campaigns, tackling a variety of issues from student fees to immigrant rights.

As an organization, members say, SDS remains committed to building a broad coalition of progressive students and avoiding the internal power struggles that haunted its previous incarnation. At Lewis and Clark College, 20-year-old member Guy Dobbs said, the chapter rotates meeting facilitators and has a strict commitment to sharing authority. Above all, building a strong base of activists is key. “[The old SDS] leaders lost faith in the ability of mass movements and turned inward on themselves,” said Dobbs. “My hope is that the new SDS will continue to grow and reach out.”

But achieving these goals isn’t easy. “It’s pretty hard to get people to engage in this kind of [organizing] work,” said Elena Blanc, a member of Reed College’s SDS. “It seems ideas about what it means to build a movement and to build power through popular support have been forgotten.” Because much of the work in recent years has been focused on single issues—like environmentalism or women’s rights—it’s easy for students to feel disconnected, Blanc said. In particular, the ubiquity of online activism has contributed to a sense of powerlessness, she argued, “because it hasn’t really engaged people, they have no control or investment in it, and it’s not helping them developing their own leadership skills.”

Meanwhile, Rudd argues, the rise of the Internet and a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry have simultaneously encouraged youth to define themselves by their consumer choices, not their politics. Today’s youth are “just stuck in their countercultural niches,” Rudd said: “I’m hardcore punk, I’m west-coast hip-hop, I’m nouveau punk, and so on.” Rudd argues that clinging to such identities—what he calls, quoting Freud, the “narcissism of small differences”—keeps youth voices trapped in the entertainment world and invisible in the political realm.

“The students today are barely starting [to organize] and they need models,” Rudd said. “The advantage at Columbia was, we were red-diaper babies and many of us had been involved in the civil rights movement.”

If students had a better sense of their own power, it would be possible to restart another broad-based student movement like SDS, Blanc argues. “Students do care, and they know what’s going on,” she said, cautioning against mistaking lack of action for apathy. From her experience in college, though, “they don’t really see any way that they can impact [the system], and so they stop engaging and don’t act, because otherwise it’s just too frustrating.”

But fear of failure, Rudd believes, isn’t license to look away. “This country is like a giant aircraft carrier, and you’re trying to change the direction, and it’ll take generations, but you’ve got to start!” he said. “[It’s] nearly impossible, but…has to be done.”

Looking back after 40 years, Rudd said that they only thing he is "really proud" about "is having been a part of the anti-war movement, in which millions were involved." He added: "To the extent that anything I did worked against the student left, or destroyed SDS—those are some of my biggest shames.”

But Rudd acknowledges that his generation’s time is over. These days, Rudd said, he’s a liberal Democrat, not a radical. “I think being a radical’s a lot better than being liberal,” he told me. “I just don’t have the energy anymore.”

“I had my heart broken by this country,” he said, “and so could you.”

Te-Ping Chen is a senior at Brown University.

The Kids Are Alright

Today’s youth activism is better than that of the ’60s. Too bad one young journalist doesn’t get it.

By Tim Fernholz | November 27, 2007 | Click to read the original post on Campus Progress.

“Do you think this is the right stereotype?” asked the journalist. “I don’t want it to be all funky when we pin it on.”

“Looks good to me,” her editor said, without even glancing at the article.

Meet the new face of journalism’s anti-youth activism movement. Courtney Martin, a young author, speaker, and adjunct professor, has recently penned a series of articles for the American Prospect attempting to document the political proclivities of Generation Y, the Millenials, or, in short, us kids. Her latest, “The Problem With Youth Activism,” shows just how far she is from understanding what the current generation is doing.

Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by "the man." We’re just not angry enough, she argues. But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs. Martin, despite her travels around the country speaking to college students, doesn’t understand what a new generation of activists is doing to effect political change. In fact, she doesn’t even understand who today’s young activists are.

There’s no doubt that too many Americans, young and old, are apathetic about politics and the world around them. But the fact is that young people are politically active on and off campus and more involved than many other demographic groups around the country. If you judge by their voting patterns, activism, organizing, and use of new technology, young people today are doing more now than in previous decades. Martin says we need to take advantage of our “raw power—the priceless power of being young and mad.” We already are young and mad, but we’re smart, too. Young progressives have moved beyond superficial displays of anger to spend more time changing the world than complaining about it. This isn’t to discount the strides our forebears made in the golden age of the student movement; it’s simply time to realize we don’t have to fight their battles all over again.

Martin’s first mistake is to restrict her view of young people to those who attend universities—the ones she has met. Mike Connery, a blogger who focuses on young people’s role in contemporary politics, points out that only 21 percent of all 18-29 year-olds currently attend college; even fewer are enrolled at the elite institutions at which Martin speaks. Two recent examples of successful youth activism were driven by activists who don’t fit Martin’s mold: The protests in support of the Jena 6 were brought to national attention thanks to youth-produced online campaigns, and the massive immigration protests in 2006 were successful in part because of online youth organizing, including the more than 100,000 high school students who walked out of class thanks to MySpace organizing. This isn’t to mention work by, for example, the League of Young Voters, an explicitly off-campus organization, and many other groups that engage young people without a campus focus.

But let’s play by Martin’s rules and restrict our definition of "youth activism" to "student activism." Martin conflates cooperation with university administrators with selling out. But today’s college students aren’t dealing with the same school administrators as their ’60s-era counterparts. Many schools retain a commitment to social justice, and when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, students hold them to it, as with University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman and affirmative action. Further, there’s no shame in using university money to agitate, especially, as Connery notes, when students are the ones who distribute it. And, as any organizer knows, it’s not always smart to view the powers-that-be as enemies: Young activists must change administrator’ minds and polices through pressure and sound arguments—not just piss them off.

Martin proves to be completely unaware of the effective student activism taking place today. For example, at my own college, Georgetown University, students have organized a successful living wage campaign that led to the unionization of sub-contracted workers and helped negotiate a raise for security guards. They also started STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, an activist group that has chapters on 600 high school and college campuses. LGBTQ students and their allies forced the administration to enact plans to hire a full-time LGBTQ resource coordinator—which is a big deal for a Catholic university. And this is just in the four years that I’ve been here.

Around the country, organizations like Campus Progress fund issue campaigns that are conceived and organized by students on issues from stopping the death penalty and global warming to ending the war in Iraq. Some students have recently organized to support affirmative action. As Connery points out, other students at Harvard University and New York University have protested for a living wage and against bad immigration policies. And these are just the examples that make it into the national media. Despite Martin’s condescension, students who raise awareness of issues large and small on campuses across the country are engaging in meaningful activism, too. This might be part of Martin’s problem: Many community-centric activists aren’t involved in monolithic national movements. But these students aren’t voting on buttons—they’re passionate about working to change the world.

And it’s not just activism. Thanks to the work of our baby-boomer forebears, young people have a place in politics today. They work on political campaigns, in think tanks, and in government. They seek to expose problems and advocate for change through journalism and blogging. They even run for office. They are part of groundbreaking campaigns like the Oregon Bus Project and Forward Montana. Our generation is also taking the lead in online organizing, from Facebook to MySpace. Do you think that the YouTube debate, arguably the best of the election cycle so far, would have happened without our generation’s influence?

The fact is that my generation is more politically active than most in the media realize: Forty-nine percent of youth voters went to the polls in 2004—over a million more youth voted nationwide than seniors. That number has increased for three years straight. In the 2006 mid-term elections, 24 percent of us turned out, to make up 13 percent of the electorate—a four percent increase from the 2002 midterms. More importantly, young Americans voted overwhelmingly for anti-war candidates in congressional races, which led to a change in congressional control. But, for Martin, a change in political control doesn’t count unless someone’s waving a sign.

Martin and other critics of student activism point to the fragmentation of the anti-war movement as key evidence of our generation’s failures. In another piece for the Prospect, filled with similar wishy-washy generalities, Martin laments that our anger about the Iraq war hasn’t resulted in much action to stop it. Of course, she doesn’t suggest what this action ought to be. That’s because there isn’t much agreement on what to do—the war is bad news, but no one from the grassroots up knows the best way to end it. Protests won’t help, especially ones led by fringe groups like ANSWER. Like the generation before them, activists today have helped turn public opinion against the war, and they’ve elected a Congress with a mandate to end it—and it’s taken them about the same amount of time as it did for students in the ’60s. But the executive branch has the most control over foreign policy, and only when its occupant is against the war will we see real progress. Until then, young people must work on defining what type of foreign policy our generation should support. Luckily, some "complacent" college students have already founded an organization dedicated to getting student ideas on policy issues into the public discourse.

Martin says she would rather see young activists spend their time placing “viruses in campus administrators’ computers with pop-up windows demanding no more expansion into poor, local neighborhoods,” creating “mock draft cards [to send] home to their parents,” and organizing “a dance party—1 million youth strong—on the Washington lawn.” All of Martin’s suggestions have one thing in common, besides their sheer inanity (what, exactly, is “the Washington lawn?”): They would achieve nothing, except to further the stereotype that young people don’t understand politics. But then again, neither does Martin. As my generation works out how to make our own impact on the political system, we don’t need a ’60s wannabe telling us we’re not angry enough.

Tim Fernholz is a senior at Georgetown University and Editor-in-Chief of The Georgetown Voice. He is also a member of the Campus Progress Student Advisory Board.