(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)
One of the most overlooked facets of the Democratic Party, I feel, is the College Democrats. The national organization is not particularly impressive. As a deputy finance director for my school’s chapter, the Penn College Democrats, I’ve been well-informed about the lack of funds that comes to us from CDA, which is nominally affiliated with the Democratic National Committee. It’s disappointing that the party doesn’t particularly spend any time or money on college campuses, considering that younger Americans are generally more liberal and therefore more inclined to be Democrats. They may come to speak at the CDA national convention, but there’s nary a word more than that.
However, one of the more effective strategies that we’ve come upon here at Penn is something that’s fairly simple: invite the candidates to come to campus and speak for themselves. Although we held a fundraiser last April that features local candidates such as PA-06 Democratic candidate Lois Murphy and PA-08 Democratic candidate Patrick Murphy, as well as prominent bloggers such as Chris Bowers of MyDD and Atrios, it’s a given that the first meeting of the academic year is guaranteed to be the biggest. In 2004, we filled a lecture room in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall – nothing to sneeze at – mainly on the strength that it was a presidential election year. Last year, while we certainly had good turnout, I wondered how it would be possible to sustain the effort, as it was an electoral off-year and there were only local elections occurring – nothing prominent. This year, I knew there’d be a lot of people – but it was difficult to predict what would happen. Because several Penn Dems are working on the Murphy campaign, it wasn’t too much trouble scheduling Patrick to come to our opening meeting – but would that be enough to coax a good crowd to show up?
Simply put, the turnout blew past my wildest dreams.
I showed up roughly 5-10 minutes early to a lecture hall in Huntsman Hall (the new main building at the Wharton School) that seats probably 75 people or so. While I was able to set up shop quickly enough (I foolishly thought I typed fast enough to be a stenographer for Patrick’s speech), the seats disappeared quickly…and people kept flowing in. I had to step out to take a phone call as the meeting began, and there was a group of 30-40 people or so coming down the halls. Eventually, people were literally sitting on any open space available on the floor. I’d estimate that there were about 150-200 people crammed into the room, undoubtedly beyond what the fire safety limit is. Even better, there were many, many faces I had never seen at a Penn Dems meeting before. As I go to the great majority of our meetings, it’s safe to say that a great deal of the attendees – probably 70-80% – were freshmen. This was a great improvement over 2004, when most of the people attending the opening meeting of our organization appeared to be upperclassmen (then again, I was a freshman, so I probably knew next-to-nobody).
After a brief introduction by our president and other board members, we played Patrick’s first ad to hit the airwaves just before he and his wife entered to a rousing reception. One of the great things that Patrick does – which most politicians show a strange inability to do – is to not stick to the same stump speech and to make it more personal. He interspersed it with an anecdote from his days in college, when he introduced President Clinton to an audience at Kings College, as well as getting a little ribbing in on Jenni for being a College Republican (the crowd got a good laugh out of that one). Nevertheless, he spoke a little bit about himself and his opponent, freshman GOP Representative Mike Fitzpatrick, but he appealed to our students on the most important topic – the importance of volunteering. As I’ve witnessed, it’s extremely difficult convincing college students to give up any of their free time for political activities. In 2004, we organized a canvassing trip to the Philadelphia suburbs in support of Kerry. It was slightly embarrassing to see far more Brown University students – who had taken a several-hour bus ride down for the weekend – than the handful of Penn students, including myself. But when you have an exciting new candidate like Patrick make that appeal for us, instead of it merely being relegated to one of our listserv emails – it exponentially increases the effect it has. Last spring, Patrick also attended a meeting of ours the day before a DFA fundraiser for his campaign at a local bar. It was our biggest general body meeting of the semester, and I noticed most of the students coming up and speaking to him afterwards, offering to sign up and volunteer for his campaign.
This year, the reception was no different – but on a much larger scale, as this was a barely standing-only room. Student after student came up to Patrick to speak to him. In addition, I noticed that the majority of people had filled out forms we had handed out for deputy positions within the organization. To me, it shows that having a real, live candidate come and speak off the cuff makes it much easier to connect to the students. Sure, people may not like Rick Santorum that much (I learned today that he and Fitzpatrick attended the same law school – the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), but it’s hard for the few political junkies in the organization such as myself to convince students that it’s important for them to volunteer their time. Having a candidate come down and spend 10-15 minutes speaking, and then sticking around to make sure that anyone who wants to speak to him is able to – this is how you light the political spark inside students. Being a young guy (he recounted that when he returned to West Point to be a professor of constitutional law, he was mistaken for an incoming freshman), it’s easier for Patrick to really connect with young Americans my age. He asked us to just volunteer one day of our week helping out his campaign. Given that the Penn Dems will be taking a group out to the suburbs on Satuday, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have an incredibly high turnout for the event. It helps that everyone’s train ticket will be paid for as well.
I think the key lesson to be learned here is that Democrats need to reach out more actively for the youth vote. It doesn’t mean paying lip service at the CDA convention, where the attendees are already likely to be active in the political arena. What it means is that our candidates and our elected representatives need to actually show up to local meetings and actively connect with the people who can provide them with more energy and more manpower than they could ever dream of. Maybe they can take our vote for granted – but it takes a lot more effort to convince a college student that they should spend an afternoon on the weekends sweating their asses off for a candidate instead of relaxing or doing homework. Patrick’s taken that message to heart, and I have no doubt that if he wins, it will be in no small part due to the massive support he gets, particularly from those of us attending school in the Philadelphia area.
