YearlyKos is 2.0 landmark
This year’s YearlyKos marked a milestone in the marriage of the Web 2.0 and the political process. As the largest gathering ever of bloggers and presidential candidates, YearlyKos featured a candidate debate and served as a meeting place for the various factions of the progressive movement.
Blue Oregon discusses Howard Dean’s remarks about Democratic strategy:
One of the other most interesting things I learned this week was from Gov. Dean at his speech Friday night: that the most important thing we can do immediately is get young people registered to vote and then get them to vote. As I was heading to my room to crash one night, I ran into this tall guy named Jefferson Smith in the hall and shared some of this with him - and he knew most of it:
That if you vote three times in a row, you’re likely to vote the rest of your life - and HOW you vote is an indicator of how you’re likely to vote for the rest of your life. The decline in turnout we’ve seen in recent years nationwide is a result of the lack of outreach to young people in the Reagan era.
The Fix at Washington Post adds in:
Renowned Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg had some advice for the progressive bloggers gathered here for the second annual YearlyKos convention: Think big.
As in, big gains for Democrats in both the House and the Senate in 2008. “Do not think conservatively,” said Greenberg during a panel discussion on the impact of Iraq on polling and the coming election. “The idea of a 50-seat-plus majority is real.”
Greenberg wasn’t the only Democratic strategist predicting huge gains. Tom Mattzie, Washington director of MoveOn.org, insisted that a path existed to a 60-seat majority in the Senate after the 2008 election.
There were no big newsmaking events in the debate, but plenty of interesting bits of nuance concerning the dance between the candidates and the Daily Kos community. The Chicagoist discusses Hillary Clinton’s interesting session with the bloggers…
Starting off with a brief address to the packed room of bloggers and activists, she opened the floor up to questions. Like anytime that Hillary speaks, especially to voters, she comes off a lot like John Kerry with balls: nuanced in her response to questions, senatorial in the points of her plan to solve just about anything presented, while still taking potshots at the Bush administration. When asked about the war in Iraq, she starts a lengthy soliloquy on rule-of-law and habeas corpus, and talks about putting America on the road to shutting down Guantanamo Bay. Looking around the room it becomes clear who supports Hillary, who will be volunteering on her campaign: middle-class suburban soccer moms and the daughters that they raised to head off to small liberal arts colleges in nowhere towns out east. She closes her session by telling the crowd that she “has been on the record as against ‘Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell” since 1999.”
More than anyone else though, the Daily Kos crowd prefers Edwards. We did a search on the number of Daily Kos diaries mentioning particular Democratic presidential candidates over the past month. Here are the results:
Edwards, 712
Obama, 630
Clinton, 504
Gore, 412
Kucinich, 207
Dodd, 131
Biden, 120
Richardson, 112
Gravel, 93
What is surprising is the still-strong interest in Gore, and the inability for the second tier candidates to gather much interest from the Kos crowd. As the early primaries may well be affected by the blogging community, Edwards and Obama have that on their side so far, at least with this important constituency.
