The 2008 election presents an incredible opportunity for Democrats to take control of our government and build the foundation for a long lasting progressive movement in our country. But to win in November, we will have to contend with a desperate Republican Party that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to divide and deceive the American people for their own partisan gain. To cut through all of the GOP propaganda, Faux News misinformation campaigns and right-wing radio hate speech Democrats are going to have to get out and talk face-to-face with voters about our vision for America and how we will put this country back on track.

At 21st Century Democrats, we are working hard to play our role in the progressive infrastructure. We train activists in the art of field organizing and then put them on campaigns all across the country so they can go out and talk to voters about our candidates and our vision for the future. On June 4-8, we will hold our National Field Organizer Training: Major League Action at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

(Cross posted from BoydaBloc)

On Monday, Congresswoman Nancy Boyda's re-election became only the second federal campaign in Kansas to file by petition in the last 15 years.

The only other candidate to do so?  Nancy Boyda- when she ran the first time in 2004.

Dear diary,  I'm wondering what has happened to you my diary.  

Last year I ventured inside the walls of kingdom kos and like any newbie I jumped back out and said whoa.  My diary you didn't grab me, in fact you scared me.

Kos is a scary place for those unfamiliar with the system.  Myself, I come from the forums of Democraticunderground.  Forums I understand with the indexing and classification systems.  Want to read about Israel then drop into the Israel/Palestine forum and browse the posts from the last 48 or 72 hours.  I also have my own Wordpress Blog at Partizane.com which with syndication has really just become a cross post of my Kos writings along with other's I respect.

Senator Obama has created a field.

It is ever more a potent attractor because of the intelligence, creativity, empathy, commitment, fortitude, courage, selflessness, kindness, ... of all those aggregating and collaborating to sustain and enhance opportunity for not just Americans but humanity.

It's just that simple.

It's just that powerful and it will bring us all together to be so much more than any one of us ever expected we would experience.

The progressive movement can do a lot of things. We can elect good politicians (and we get a chance to do that a few times every two-year cycle -- local and state politicians matter too). We can track the actions of the bad ones.

The most fun (for me, anyway), is to lobby Congress and our state and local governments to implement progressive policies. I'm a lobbyist (my firm is called Progressive Public Affairs), so in this brief break in presidential primary politics, I thought I'd share one of the tactics that I like to use in the hopes of recruiting more of the progressive movement to think of themselves as lobbyists.

I hope that more organizations -- particularly those based in Washington with a large membership -- use this tactic more often. It's recruiting messengers. And it's essentially focusing on the parts of the country where people get to vote in federal elections instead of on the parts of the county where people work for the federal government. More after the jump.

The conservative congressmen, the administration, the pundits, the news television, why am I not hearing them speak out for the troops?  Who is dunning our soldiers to return their benefits back to the government?  Who is keeping quiet to allow this to happen to our soldiers?

Whose idea was it?  Whose idea was it to hoodwink the soldiers and make them repay their bonuses?

And what's with the conservative definition games?

A while back I wrote a 'I got a new job and won't have time to write much' but even political folks get Thanksgiving off. To recap, I was hired to be a field organizer in Maine. All across the country the DNC and DSCC are funding organizers. Grassroots, community based to help support targeted races as well as up and down the ticket, county parties, etc. Now doesn't that warm you up and provide some depth to that 50 state strategy Howard Dean talks about?

There are 16 counties in Maine and I'm working in two of them. My intent in this diary is to give you a taste of what this type of work is like without telling too much (I'm pretty sure Repubs read this site). The biggest thing is there is a major commitment by the nationals to on the ground organizing and it looks promising. Of course, without people volunteering to take the country back, this organizing won't amount to much so it all depends on getting people to do the nuts and bolts of politics. What's been going on? Onto the flip

Cross-posted at Future Majority

As I talk to more and more of the folks who are working to build leadership capacity in the progressive youth movement.  I'm finding that it's not for lack of programs that we're suffering.  Young People For Fellowships, PolitiCorps, Camp Wellstone, DMI Scholars, DFA Academies, New Organizing Institute - we're building the structures.  They may not be as sexy as some of the conservative operations, but programs are available for all sectors of the movement.  It's scale and funding that are the real problems.  

With that in mind, here's a no-cost, potentially high impact opportunity to get some training for all you out there in "youth" land.  And you won't even have to travel.

Republicans continue to beat us in the field. Even though our financial resources in 2006 reached parity with the Republicans, and we had much more enthusiasm on our side, they were clearly ready. Chris Shays and Heather Wilson and Steve Chabot and Deborah Pryce were incumbents that held on because they ran a tried and true effort to turn out their voters. We have serious problems in the way we run Democratic field operations. I've laid out ways we can improve upon them below.

Cross posted at Future Majority.

We've talked a lot lately about young voters. How they turned out in near record numbers, and broke heavily democratic.  Pollsters, bloggers and strategists are also busy promoting the fact that if a someone votes for a party 3 times (before they turn 30),they are likely to become a life-long voter for that party.  The new conventional wisdom is this: "youth voted Democratic in 2004  and in 2006.  If we get them in 2008, we've locked a generation the size of the baby boomers for life."

While technically correct, there are some assumptions in that statement that need to be challenged.

Cross posted at Future Majority

I've been skeptical of the value of Second Life - as both a type of social network and more particularly as a campaign resource - for quite a while.  It's never struck me as a place that is highly populated by a desirable audience that isn't reachable as part of another, larger (or niche) audience.  And I've never seen the real value in it as anything other than a novelty.

Social Web guru Clay Shirky is putting stats to that claim.  Any campaign interested in pursuing a Second Life strategy should read his recent article dissecting the hype  that surrounds Second Life.

On November 8th and 9th, there will be plenty of stories about the role of social networking in the midterm elections.  If current predictions hold, most likely those stories will focus on how social networking played a key role in turning out young voters.  Hopefully for Democratic candidates.

But what have candidates really done with their social networking profiles, and what will they need to do in 2008 to take this campaign tool to the next level?

I have some problems with this.

My first problem is that Fisher has made some pretty bold, broad claims--and backed them up with really bad writing. This review by Jim B in Counterpunch is probably the most insightful and generally on-the-mark piece you'll find on the matter, and he says:

"It is an analytically incoherent book... a shallow, muddled, unrewarding account."

But that's just my first problem.  

Cross-posted at Future Majority

In response to the post I wrote a few weeks ago about the changing narrative around young voters, I received a call from Ivan Frishberg, who sits on the board of Young Voter PAC and the advisory board of CIRCLE.  Ivan wrote to me to both confirm and elaborate on my thesis: that the media narrative surrounding young voters has changed and is reaching a potential tipping point this November.  In our conversation, he painted an enlightening picture as to how and why the media misreported youth turnout in 2004, and why that narrative is finally changing.

In Ivan's recounting of the 2004 election, it begins with a strategic plan executed by a coalition that included the New Voters Project and the Youth Vote Coalition. This plan had two goals:
 

1. Get campaigns to realize the importance of young voters and, consequently, spend a more proportionate share of their campaign warchest to reach young voters; and


2. Improve media coverage of young voters.

The cornerstone of this strategy was the accumulation of reliable data about field work aimed at young voters.  Metrics.

And that's why this little book released last month is a big deal. In Activism, Inc., Dana Fisher of Columbia University traces the history of the canvass--from a vital grassroots GOTV tool of local politicians, to an innovative tactic for burgeoning advocacy/lobbying groups in the 70s, to the big-box fundraising industry that sprawled out through the 90s and continues to grow today. Fisher's book is billed as the first formal study of the modern fundraising canvass ever published. (She recently published a piece in the American Prospect that more or less summarizes her argument.)

I sat down with Dana Fisher for a Podcast a few weeks ago to talk about the book and her findings.

Click to download the complete podcast (35 minutes)

You can also find links to each segment of the podcast at Future Majority. The four segments include: Part I - The History of Canvassing; Part II - Young People (Cogs in the Machine);  Part III - 2004, A Post-Mortem; and Part IV - Solutions.

After the jump you will find a review I wrote of Dr. Fisher's book.