I thought the one thing unions were still good at is GOTV.

Yes because these elections will matter so much in the long run. Here’s an idea whats time has finally come. Why not use this blog site to talk about and promote elections!? I mean, given that we live in a working democracy (representative republic) where our representatives are not at all controlled by party leadership or corporatist influences and always weigh heavily what’s best for most average Americans and our society, wouldn’t it be a good idea to constantly talk about the value of elections and the electoral process as an avenue for lasting change? Not just every third column, but every column. You know really dig in and encourage everyone to make that difference by voting?

Aha. Some one has shown up who’s gonna tell FDL what to do.

Just a suggestion, geez. What’s the harm in that?

sad to say, it doesn’t matter anymore which party wins, the corporatists will buy off everyone and anyone

Tuesday’s election is a little different. Here’s what the incumbent said

Read between the lines here. This was in front of a Republican audience, and he’s playing on their fears of his opposition, Assistant US Attorney JoAnn Kloppenburg. He’s saying to vote for him because his opponent would rule against Scott Walker.

So while Kloppenburg may eventually be bought off, her beating the incumbent on Tuesday will make a major diff in near term events in WI.

godspeed Kloppenburg

The mission of this particular Firedoglake venue (“FDL Elections” in the title being a clue) is to discuss elections, yes. Sometimes you will see these blogposts promoted to the front page of FDL.

It’s not as if the corporate takeover of both parties has been ignored at Firedoglake.

What’s the Diebold situation in WI?

Parents and grandparents of Wisconsin, GOTYV [get out the youth vote]. Tell your kids, grandkids, their vote matters.

Did you see the note I left in book salon EPUland?

Has anyone done any work to get at the heart of this youth apathy? Is it that sense of invulnerability that you have in your 20s that keeps the focus on self, and avoiding some of the crazy fight that the Right offers up politically? To young folks, I imagine that the meanness seems near unbelievable. If you’re young and just trying to stay alive, who’s got time for that?

Or something else…

Looking past Tuesday and the recall elections coming downstream, how long can we ignore the elephant in the living room? Namely, when are we going to force unions to start organizing new fields or job classifications? When are we going to have the mother of all labor showdowns, the organizing of Wal-Mart?

If unions want to keep youth on their side, they should start doing something for those youths other than justs trying to keep public sector unions from losing what they still have left.

Good question. I have no idea why the youth apathy & in my wide ranging reading have not come across any studies.

Speaking for myself, I always voted since I was eligible, even though I wasn’t that politically interested until recently. Seemed like the civic thing to do. Plus my parents took me with when they voted, so they set an example.

The union leadership is in the veal pen.

Like any possibility of political change these days, it will have to come from bottom up if it is to happen at all.

When it comes to the decline in voting, especially among the youth, it is good to reflect on why most people do and don’t vote. We are one of the few societies in the west where the process of voting is privatized or a better way to put it is that the onus is all on the voters. They don’t have to register, they are already registered. There are different laws that makes sure they don’t have to deal with any of the crap we Americans put up with. Health care being tied to employment means people will not want to miss work. Republicans have made the burden worse in many regards, as well as well meaning progressives(a long time ago), but in most countries there is no such burden. Voter suppression is the Republicans forte and they are very good at it. They make sure it is on a single day, it is not advertised, and that you have to have registered to vote two weeks before the election. Not to mention that the last truly national effort progressives made to enfranchise more people was the Voting Rights act of 1965 and the 26th amendment.

Younger people in college are not all from Wisconsin so they have to re-register, if they have ever at all. Who knows what their schedule is going to look like on a random Tuesday. Groups hastily organized, or long established groups, on big campuses will have low penetration into the student body. They would required a lot more time to organize.

Young people that are not in college are going to be worse off. They are not likely to be unionized, if they have a job at all. Unemployed people are not much likely to vote. Unions are good at getting out the vote of there members and even of non-union people, but there are even more barriers for getting young people out. They will not have a land-line that can be phone banked, but a cell phone, and they won’t pick up if it is a number they don’t recognize. They are less likely to own a home, so it will be harder to canvass them. So you can’t fall back on the standard union activity to gotv. Yet again, burden falls on the parents or relatives who are union to get them to the polls, which makes them a layer removed from the contact. Now we run into the problem of organizational strength. Republicans have been activating their voters and investing in the infrastructure that get them to the polls for decades. Progressive organizing has been haphazard at best and piss poor at worst. Many times the Democrats have actively sabotage the effort to bring more people into the process(ACORN). There has been good effort made to help bring more people into the process, but it has been too small to make a difference. We have not had a sustained effort to organize youth voters since, well, the sixties

I wish support for the youth wasn’t a mile wide and an inch deep.

Excellent points, I think, JG. Another huge problem regarding organized labor and GOTV efforts is one that has been touched on well here in other comments. Unions tend to support Democrats, full stop. That’s a huge problem when almost the entire Democratic Party is owned by the investor class and reflexively demonstrates fealty to the corporate world. Unions barter their votes to these hacks for diminishing returns of crumbs for their own members. Why should a young person who’s willing and able to fight through the barriers JG describes come out to vote for one of those hacks? Because self-serving union leadership says so? To illustrate: I’m a union firefighter, and I find it darkly amusing that cops and firefighters are now threatening the GOP with the loss of their ‘support.’ I want to tell them all: ‘hey, a**holes! While the GOP and corporatist Dems have been crucifying the rest of the working people, how many pieces of silver were they promising you?’ Until labor unions put aside the Original American Sins and start doing as BeachPopulist suggests (which would eventually involve, in the shorter term at least, some ballot box insurgencies like putting a few Greens into national office), the returns will continue to diminish and young people will remain disconnected.

I should add that the polls demonstrating theoretical youth support for labor unions make BeachPopulist’s suggestions all the more urgent. As the 2010 midterms clearly demonstrated, nothing can be more deadly to a group’s political fortunes than the perception that it has betrayed its supporters.

BeachPopulist hit the nail on the head. The Wisconsin Uprising is almost purely defensive in terms of goals. Also it is asking a little much of the youth when there is no time to organize a group that has never been organized before.We are forced to think in days when honestly we would need years to have anything resembling what would be necessary to get them out for more than a one shot deal. Plus the resources necessary to organize them aren’t really forthcoming. The unions or other progressive groups don’t have those kinds of resources.

Also there is the distinct problems of the term “youth” The term is only useful when understanding the extra barriers this group faces when it comes to being a part of the political process. Besides that they are really not all that much different from any other age group. They want security in terms of health care, a job, a home, the ability to put food on the table, and the freedom to live there lives in peace instead of fear. They aren’t going to get any of that any time soon and no one seems to be admitting that.