Wednesday, June 29, 2022

This Is How We Reach The Yutes

A slightly hilarious thing at the Dawn Of The Age of Blogging was that political communication people saw it is an exciting way to reach Young People, because it was on the interwebs and the interwebs was all young people. Of course even 20 years ago I (and other more prominent bloggers, --this is not about me of course) was not especially young, and more importantly typical politcal blog readers at the time were not young at all, but there was always a How Do You Do, Fellow Kids approach to blogs then.

A bit silly, but better than then "fuck the young people, they don't vote anyway," which is a common attitude I see directed at anyone under about 45 quite frequently. The general view of voting habits of young people is wrong (the "young" turn out a bit better than the earlier "young" did, generally), but they don't have to turn out in record numbers to matter. A lot. Something we seem to appreciate about 7 retirees at an Ohio diner.

There was no golden age of young voter outreach, but it existed 20 years ago. Efforts I am thinking of were shuttered.

A lot of seeds were planted in the early aughts that were then plowed over. Really not just shuttered but nuked from orbit. I'm not aware of everything, so maybe I'm missing some stuff, but...