"What Happens in Vegas..."

Our local contingent (Andrew and Lynn) blog on, while the national press rediscovers the blogosphere: "Not just Bush-haters in bathrobes" and "Liberal Bloggers Gather in Las Vegas" give you the flavor of what happens when traditional journalists try to understand the netroots. Like any stopped clock, they are right at least twice a day. Out of town, the advice to the Dems continues: "A Gift to Democrats:"

Here’s why Democrats would be smart to invest in young people:

1) They actually like us. This is the only age group that voted for Kerry.
2) They will vote if we reach out to them effectively. Young people had the largest increase in voter participation of any age group in 2004.
3) There are a lot of them, 60 to 70 million. This generation is almost as large as the Baby Boomers.
4) This is most diverse generation ever in America. One in three is a racial minority.
5) We keep losing when we write young people off. Democrats have to try something new if we expect a different result.

The numbers alone make it clear that this group could not only make an electoral difference immediately. But, more important, losing them now could mean losing them for the rest of their lives. We decided that getting young people involved, aware, and persuaded would be the best long- and short-term investment we could make. Nearly every Washington insider who came through our office told us we were wasting our money because young people don’t vote and when they do it is for Republicans. Worse, we were accused of being dangerous for drawing money from programs that are proven to ones that are way too risky.

Rather than allowing this sort of thinking to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, we chose to ignore this advice and invest in things we thought had the chance of working as opposed to the certainty of failure. That has turned out to be our smartest political decision yet. Our investment in young people delivered the greatest bang for the buck of any political investment we have ever made.

So now that the numbers are in, why isn’t the DNC making a major investment in young people? Why do College Democrats continue to have a budget so small that it can’t support more than a couple staff people? Does the Democratic Party know of another untapped, massive progressive voting bloc that we could mobilize?

If you look at how Howard Dean is spending his time, I’d have to guess he thinks evangelicals are the key for Democrats. To that I say good luck and let me know how it went for you in December 2006 when we are wondering why voters abandoned the Democrats again in the final months of the campaign. Then, I will once again suggest that is might be easier and more effective to turn out young people who actually agree with us than to change an evangelical’s mind.

-Deborah Rappaport on The Huffington Post.