Nebraska Senate candidate and Netroots favorite Scott Kleeb is live blogging NOW at Future Majority.  

I hope you'll join us.  I've posted Scott's initial comments below the fold.

Right now at Future Majority we're having a very special father/son live blog.  Jim Slattery, running for the US Senate in Kansas, and his 26 year old son Mike, running for the Kansas legislature, are live blogging at Future Majority.

The Slattery's initial comments are posted in the extended entry.  They'll be with us until 11am Eastern at Future Majority.

Hello MyDD,

Darcy Burner, Democratic Candidate in Washington's 8th District is live-blogging right now at Future Majority.  

Darcy is participating in the Serve with the General competition put together by Democrat's Work.  She's reaching out to young people to help her campaign and to help her win the competition to send General Wesley Clark to her district. Please come by and chat with Darcy about her race, and why she deserves your vote.

Come join us.  I've posted Darcy's initial comments in the extended diary.

Hello MyDDers,

Jared Polis, Democratic Candidate in Colorado's 2nd District is live-blogging right now at Future Majority.  

Jared is discussing Colorado youth, the challenges of being a young candidate, and his proposals for ending price-gouging by oil companies at the gas pump - an issue I'm sure we all find relevant these days.  

Come join us.  I've posted Jared's initial comments in the extended diary.

Anyone who has read a poll knows that the economy is the #1 concern for young people today, but what does that mean in terms of the policies they would support?  The Center for American Progress just issued a new report that sheds light on this not-often-explored intersection of demographics and policy.  The report - The Progressive Generation: How Young Adults Think About the Economy - does much to dispel myths (like the one that says young people are gung-ho about Social Security Privatization), and clarifies the position of Millennials on a number of issues.  The report provides some rays of hope to the labor movement, and has a lot to say not just about the economy, but really what Millennials think about the role of government in America.  

This should be mandatory reading for campaigns, the Party, and anyone seeking to understand the political beliefs of the youngest generation.  Here are the major findings:

• Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any age group in the 30 previous years the question has been asked, with 57 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds saying that health insurance should come from a government insurance plan.
  


• Eighty-seven percent of Millennials think the government should spend more money on health care even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level of support in the question's 20-year history.
  


• An overwhelming 95 percent of Millennials think education spending should be increased even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level ever recorded on this question in the 20 years it has been asked.
  
• Sixty-one percent of Millennials think the government should provide more services, the most support of any age group in any of the previous 20 years the question was asked.


• When asked in the General Social Survey whether they were in favor or against the idea that cutting government was a good way to help the economy, Millennials had the lowest support of cutting government spending in the history of the question.


• Millennials are very supportive of  labor unions, giving them an average ranking of 60 on a 0-to-100 scale (with 0 indicating a more negative view of labor unions and 100 being a more positive view), the second-highest level of support of any age group in the over 40-year history of the question.

For the more graphically inclined, here's what that looks like in graphs:

CIRCLE has crunched what numbers they could and here are the results from yesterday's primary:

There are a boatload of caveats that come with these stats.  First, looking at the turnout number (14%), it needs to be noted that this is a low-ball number.  CIRCLE doesn't just calculate the turnout within the Democratic Primary, they calculate it for the entire electorate.  Last night there were no exit polls for the Republican primary, making it impossible for CIRCLE to crunch the data on that side of the aisle.  So the 14% comes purely from Democratic turnout, but it's representative of the entire electorate.  If CIRCLE were able to add in data from the Republican turnout, that number would surely rise.

Second, because there were no exit polls at all done in Pennsylvania in 2000 or 2004, we have no data against which to compare these numbers.  We can, however, make a few very good guestimates.

What we do know is that turnout doubled in Pennsylvania last night, and that in 2004, the average youth "share of the electorate" was 9%.  So in a year in which turnout doubled overall, young people gained a 3% greater share of all voters than they did in 2004.  So youth turnout yesterday was likely more than double what it was in 2004.

As per usual, youth turnout also went heavily for Senator Obama.  According to CNN Exit polling, 18 - 24 year olds broke for Obama 66 - 34%.  Among 25 - 29 year olds the race narrowed, though Obama still carried the cohort 55 - 45%.

As I noted earlier in the week, Ohio and Pennsylvania are very demographically similar states.  If Obama was to win or be competitive tonight, he needed youth to turnout be a greater share of the electorate in PA than it was in OH.  That didn't happen.  In Ohio, the youth share of the electorate was 3 percentage points higher, at 15% (pdf).  There were likely a number of factors that kept youth turnout down.  

There have been some reports of problems at the polling place, but a greater problem was likely the fact that many students - who have made up a disproportionately high number of young voters this cycle - missed the registration deadline, which bumped up against spring break, or they voted absentee in their home state during the previous contests.  There is also the matter of brain-drain.  Pennsylvania is one of the oldest states in the country, in no small part due to the fact that young college graduates leave the state to find work elsewhere.  In other states, college-educated young voters have played a large role in boosting youth turnout.

While it's great news for Democrats, the Obama campaign, and youth activists that, in spite of those hurdles mentioned above, young voters turned out yesterday in greater numbers than every before, there was still room for growth.   Young voters in PA made up 21% of the eligible electorate, so young people still did not vote in proportion to their share of the population.  There was a 9% gap between what happened, and what was possible.  Look at previous contests and you will see that this gap has occurred time and again this primary season.  We've seen big gains - double, triple, even quadruple turnout - in every single state, but with the notable exceptions of Iowa and New Hampshire, these numbers have lagged behind young voters' share of the population.

Why is that so?

In Iowa and New Hampshire, which saw the largest share of the electorate and the largest turnout rate, respectively, among young people, youth organizers were moving full-steam ahead.  Every 501c3, c4, and 527 was on the ground working to turn out young people.  This has not been the case in the rest of the  primary contests and caucuses.  Progressive youth orgs just don't have the budget to run full youth campaigns during the primary season and no one thought this contest would go past February 5th.  We were all caught unprepared for this and the youth vote in the remaining states is not turning out  as much as it could be as a consequence.  

There's a strong argument to be made here that the Obama campaign, for all the incredible work that it has done in energizing young people, needs help.  It can't turn out the youth vote to the greatest degree possible on its own.  It will need the support of outside youth organizations like YDA, The League, Young Voter PAC and more.  If Obama donors who are maxed-out want to continue to help his candidacy, they could do a lot worse than directing some funds to these independent youth organizations that will be on the ground this cycle, and well after the polls close in November.

As I've said in my book and many times in the past, Millennials are a larger generation than the Baby Boom, and research shows that if you can get someone to vote for a party in their first three major elections, you can lock in their partisanship for life.  Getting these young voters out now is about more than the Obama campaign.  It's about building partisan loyalty and securing a progressive majority for the next 40 - 50 years.  That's a worthwhile longterm investment.

Cross posted at Future Majority.

Since I've been traveling so much, I've taken the opportunity afforded by long plane flights to revitalize my reading habits.  So far I've read and reviewed Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and David Kinnaman's UnChristian.  I've been enjoying this chance to read again.  It's a good habit that unfortunately dropped well below previous levels as I worked on my book and struggled to juggle a full-time job and blogging.  I've been able to do a new book every 12 - 15 days, and hope to keep that  up through the spring and summer (no promises once the Fall gets here and the campaign really kicks into high-gear).

Most recently, I finished Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics by Morely Winograd and Michael Hais.  Winograd is a former policy advisor to Al Gore, and Hais is a retired executive for communications research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.  Together, they've pooled their expertise and produced a compelling look at the historical, demographic, and technological trends that have shaped American political history, and how those cyclical trends might play out as the Millennial Generation comes into it's own as a force in American politics.

In discussing a new fellowship offered by the Open Society Institute, Josh Bolotsky of Living Liberally has written a vital post on Open Left about the emerging progressive leadership training pipeline.  Read it.

Here's an excerpt:

Like so much of the frenzied progressive infrastructure-building of the last few years, much of the netroots support for these types of activist-in-training programs comes from the often correct perception that given the huge amount of ground left to cover in catching up to what the institutional right has done, we better get cracking on "the progressive version of" whatever given aspect of conservative advantage we seek to emulate - if we can just start with our own progressive version, in other words, we'll be on the right track. As someone who spent time as the Chair of a major College Democrats state federation, I can anecdotally attest to the kind of forced comparison points you often hear from frustrated students - that Campus Progress is or should be "the progressive version of" Young Americans for Freedom, or the Center for Progressive Leadership is or should be "the progressive version of" the Leadership Institute, and so on. In other words, we're so frustrated at how far behind we are in the race that we're looking for the reflexive response, which is a counterpart above all else - just as we might look at, say, Air America Radio to be "the progressive version of" right-wing talk radio.

All of which is not just well and good, but, I think, quite necessary - it's wonderful that we are moving towards having these counterparts. But as a first step - then you start moving towards innovations.  All of which makes the choice of OSI to make eligibility open to all, student or no, all the more striking: along with projects like YP4's Young Elected Officials Network, it's a unique take on the format, one that isn't a reaction to any kind of adult-training-program that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is cooking up.

The emergence of this new leadership training pipeline - particularly Young People For, DMI Scholars, and the Center for Progressive Leadership is something that I cover in my book, Youth to Power, as part of the "[dot] Org Boom."  As I've been touring, I frequently get a question similar to the one Josh is asking - is it enough to replicate what the Right has done, or do we need to innovate?

Josh is right that imitation is not enough and we need to innovate and create better training programs more suited to the values of the progressive movement - at home and internationally.  He's also right that in some ways we're starting to move beyond that "first step" in building a leadership pipeline.

But I would add that in another, more basic way we are still on "step one," as Josh terms it.  I'm speaking in terms of scale and resources.  Organizations like YAF still receive far more monetary support from the conservative foundation world and donor class, and these organizations still have a much greater scope in terms of how many conservatives they train each year.  In 2003, the last year for which I have data (data which comes, btw, from Young People For, which completed a study of the conservative Leadership Pipeline), Young America's Foundation had a $12million budget.  The Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Leadership Foundation each had $11 and $9 million, respectively.  All three of these organizations had at least $1.5 million in reserve.  That's money not earmarked for any program, but rather a mini-endowment to ensure the fiscal health of the organization should they suffer a decrease in funding.

Comparatively, the organizations cited by Josh, and covered in my book, have budgets that are less than 1/10th the annual budget of their conservative "counterparts."  In some ways, we are moving beyond "step one" - mimicking the conservative infrastructure - but in others we do still lag frustratingly behind.  One of those areas is in the level of commitment we're seeing from progressive foundations and individual donors.

This is actually a problem larger than the emerging progressive leadership pipeline.  Almost all of the new youth organizations created in the last 5 years have faced serious funding crises since the initial boom.  Many of them spent 2005 and 2007 (non-election years) operating on shoe-string budgets and almost none of them are operating at full scale.  

There are a couple of reasons for this, some of which are reasonable and some of which are extremely troublesome.  The first reason - and an understandable one - is that donors have spent the last few years demanding a much higher measure of accountability, or Return on Investment (ROI) for their donations.  Youth organizations have had to work to prove that what they do is effective with hard metrics and independent research studies.  A related issue is that no one knows how effective it is to just dump money at "the youth movement."  For every project that worked out well in 2004, there was another that bombed or had little to show for its efforts.  And many organizations that received significant funding boosts did not spend that money as efficiently as possible.  Some donors are indeed waiting to see what the balance is between their donations and effective/efficient movement to a higher scale of organizing.

The second reason, which is less acceptable, is that the progressive youth movement is still highly dependent on just a few donors who provide the millions of dollars that have made our current gains among young voters possible.  To them, I and other youth organizers are extremely grateful.  But it's unfortunate that the club of donors is so small.  The growing progressive youth infrastructure needs more supporters beyond the few that helped us get this far.  More progressives - young people included - need to be supporting the work of these groups.

This is a concurrent process - innovation and scale shouldn't occur separately.  But once this happens - once progressive youth groups have a donor base on par with their conservative counterparts - that's when I think we'll truly be out of "step one."