MAY 24, 2018
Smells Like Teen Spirit Redux
It's the 25th anniversary of the Motor Voter Act. Here's why I have hope.Many of the challenges facing nonprofits and their funders – service fragmentation, lack of coordination with other nonprofits and impact measurement – can be addressed by common digital technology platforms in use today.
While reading the Sunday paper, I saw a headline that gave me hope, Young People Keep Marching After Parkland, This Time to Register to Vote. Its lead paragraph answered a question I had been thinking about a lot this year.
“The pace of new voter registrations among young people in crucial states is accelerating, a signal that school shootings this year — and the anger and political organizing in their wake — may prove to be more than ephemeral displays of activism.”
Today, rather than MTV PSAs with Madonna wrapped in a flag, we see images of flowers and crosses hanging from a schoolyard fence. Too often we find ourselves turning off the cable news when our little kids come in the room, so they don’t see a parade of coffins filled with teenagers whose lives ended tragically like those at Santa Fe High School in Texas last week.
Twenty-five years ago, on May 20, 1993, a pop culture meets politics zenith was reached with the signing of the Motor Voter Act in 1993 by then-President Bill Clinton. It was the culmination of a long political journey that started as a concern with explicit music lyrics and ended with a sweeping change to our voter registration laws.
In 1990, I had the good fortune of joining future Rock the Vote co-founder Steve Barr at a meeting of recording artists, record executives and yes, MTV. The music industry was searching for ways to engage its 18-24-year-old consumers in what they viewed as a fight against censorship. Then California Democratic Party Chair Jerry Brown asked us to go to a meeting and talk about the work we were doing with young voters in California.
Looking slightly out-of-place in our Brooks Brothers suits, we told them the story of The Boniface Project. For the past year, we’d been organizing a group of student volunteers from local colleges to spend their weekends rebuilding a homeless shelter that was part of the St. Boniface Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Steve Barr has a video about the project narrated by Alec Baldwin somewhere). Not only did these students tear down walls and (eventually) ably hang sheetrock, they went into the neighborhood to register the residents to vote.
Our message to the recording industry was very simple: we need to teach our youth to be citizens in a democracy. Jeff Ayeroff, the visionary founder of two groundbreaking music labels – Virgin America and The Work Group – took up the mantle and launched Rock the Vote. For a modern take on teaching civics, check out former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics project.
At Rock the Vote, we did our work registering voters at Lollapalooza, via MTV, on college campuses, and during the 1992 presidential primaries. Here’s what appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few days before the 1992 N.H. primary -
Enter a group called Rock the Vote. A national, nonpartisan organization founded by the recording industry, Rock the Vote could prove to be a wild card in the '92 race. Seeking to boost nationwide turnout among young voters, organizers have swarmed across New Hampshire campuses this winter, and now claim to have registered 10,000 young people - 2,000 in Durham alone.
"Young people have an important role to play in politics, but somehow that message has been lost on this generation," said UNH organizer Jim Hickman. ''We've got to drop more young people back into the system. The reason that Iran-contra and the S&L scandals exist is because decision-makers only listen to those in the electorate who understand the game. By changing that equation, young voters can shift the political agenda."
We made a difference by contributing to an increase in young voter turnout in 1992 (52.0%), the second highest level of participation since 18-year olds became eligible to vote in 1972, and not seen again until 2008.
I treasure the moments I shared with my friends Steve Barr, Beverly Lund, Michael Dolan, Van Riker, Joel Shulkin, Dave Burke, Steve Caplan, and the countless volunteers who made Rock the Vote a driving force at the ballot box in 1992. I often wondered if we will ever see a youth movement build a coalition like one that produced a sweeping change like the Motor Voter Bill ever again. Then came Parkland.