This week, Gen-Y Magic will be profiling 4 young leaders on the political landscape. All 4 are dedicated to covering the involvement of young voters in progressive politics and write for multiple sites and communities. All 4 are players in Future Majority, a site started in in August of 2006 by Michael Connery, Alex Urevick-Acklesberg, and Josh Koenig. Today we get Mike Connery himself in the Gen-Y Hot Seat, talking about the youth running for office, why MTV is not an authority and that kids with Xboxes can make a difference in this election. Mike is also the author of Youth to Power: How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority, a book about the role of the Millennial Generation in progressive politics.

Gen-Y Magic: What is the single biggest issue that will take Gen-Y away from the Xboxes, Laptops and iPhones and actually vote this November?

Mike: Well, I wouldn’t quite phrase it that way because the last thing I want to do is continue the myth of young voters as stoned slackers enslaved to their Xbox. PEW just did a study showing that gamers and non-gamers are equally engaged in politics and civic life, and after what we’ve seen with young people becoming involve through FaceBook, YouTube, and other social technologies, it would be dead wrong to characterize those technologies or the people who use them as less involved politically. But I take your point.

Young people have much the same concerns as older voters – health care, the economy, the war in Iraq, energy policy, etc We just have a slightly different take on these issues, which impact our lives in different ways than they do older voters. Of all these issues, the economy consistently ranks as the issue that young people are most concerned with, and I imagine that concern has only grown in light of the events of the last week.

Young voters aren’t necessarily concerned about stock prices – we don’t generally own stocks and only a small portion of us have 401ks or any other type of retirement investment. But we do worry about credit card debt and college loans, and being able to find a job that will allow us to pay back those debts and start a life. We do think about needing a loan from a bank to purchase a home or car. We worry about getting a job that will give us health benefits. It’s these bread and butter issues that will drive young voters to the polls in November.

GYM: What are some things, young 20-somethings can do to make a change in their local government and community?

Mike: I’ve had the opportunity to see Howard Dean speak a number of times this year, and I think that he nails it in his current stump speech. Voting is the least you can do. If you want to make a change in your community, then run for office. School board, town supervisor, mayor, councilman, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t like the system and the choices you have at the polls, take over that system and change it from the inside.

I track a lot of media about young people in politics, and in state after state I’m reading about a record number of young people running for office, and these are not necessarily crazy long shots. The Mayor of Pittsburg, Luke Ravenstahl, is 28 years old, and he’s just one of the most visible of a growing number of young elected officials. If young people want to follow that path, there are a number of organizations, like the Center for Progressive Leadership and the Young Elected Officials Network, that are there to help get those campaigns off the ground and overcome the first hurdles in learning to govern.

Not everyone can or will run for office, and different people may want to be involved in different ways. I’d recommend that young people looking to find out how they fit into American civic life get their feet wet with an organization like Living Liberally, which uses social events like bar nights, comedy shows, book clubs, and movie screenings, or Democrats Work, a group that performs local community service tasks like beach cleanups and tree plantings. Social/political organizations like Democrats Work and Living Liberally are building the social capital upon which a healthy civic life depends, and they are both great vehicles through which young people can meet other local, politically active people and find an avenue of activism that best fits them.

And if none of those options are appealing, then I would encourage young people to find their own niche and create their own organization. That’s what I and so many other young activists did in 2003. Lacking any real youth support or infrastructure within the Democratic Party, myself and many other youth organizers worked to start our own organizations. For myself and my friends, we were huge music fans and wanted to politicize the local music communities. We started a non profit called Music for America and through a combination of hard work and luck, we were able to raise capital to start our own nonprofit. In 2004, Music for America was present at over 2,400 live music events in almost all 50 states. We estimated our message reached over 2 million people that year.

We were not alone, though. Other entrepreneurial Gen Xers and Gen Yers started over a dozen new youth-focused nonprofits that year, including the League of Young Voters, the Oregon Bus Project, and more. If we could create our own avenues of activism in 2004, young people today, armed with vastly superior technology and lower barriers to entry, can do the same in 2008.

GYM: For Gen-Y, there are a lot of great social advocates, creating change and making a difference in the lives of others. How can they get the attention of the government and show that things can be changed and a difference can be made?

Mike: This is the big question and the big test that we will confront after the election. In some respects, Boomers are primed to not hear what young people are saying. For the older generations, social change was created through a protest model spawned out of the civil rights movement. So you get people like Thomas Friedman and Al Gore wondering why young people aren’t protesting in the streets or chaining ourselves to bulldozers, and labeling us “Generation Q” for quiet.

But that model requires a level of novelty to capture the imagination of the public and obtain a high enough level of coverage in the media to change the political narrative on an issue. As we saw with the rather traditional anti-war protests leading up the Iraq War, that model is reaching the end of its efficacy. The public doesn’t care about another demonstration and the media won’t cover it. So we need new models of activism. Increasingly, that is happening within the political system rather than outside of it.

The first step truly is to turn out and vote in November. If young people substantially increase our share of the electorate, and perhaps are the determining force in electing the next president, then that will make the politicians sit up and listen. We will have proven our ability to mobilize a substantial part of the electorate and their electoral necks will all be on the line. The trick is going to be to be in parlaying that into legislative victories.

I don’t’ think anyone knows how that will play out yet. There is no one model because we are going to need to adapt to the situation, taking into account who the President is, what is the makeup of Congress, what policies are being proposed and how does it measure up against our long term goals, what is the media narrative around the issue, etc. I suspect that bottom-up, social technologies will play a vital role in some part of that in helping to organize support or resistance to certain legislative proposals, but there’s no way to say how yet.

GYM: Is the Internet really changing this election or is it media hoopla? It didn’t seem to work out too well for Ron Paul, even though we all know now who he is.

Mike: It really is making a difference. It’s allowing young people to self organize, and it is providing campaigns with a new way to reach young people online. Danah Boyd, a PhD candidate who studies social networks, calls them the new public sphere. What we know about reaching young voters is two things.

1. You have to meet young voters where they live and hang out
2. Peer to peer contact is the most effective way to mobilize youth.

Going with what Danah Boyd says, sites like FaceBook and MySpace are one of many places that young people hang out and it’s an ideal contact point for a campaign.

That said you have to move into step 2, the peer to peer contact. That’s traditional field work. The problem with the Ron Paul campaign is that they never moved offline. They never got to that peer to peer aspect. It’s the genius of the Obama campaign that they’ve been able to create a cycle whereby young people meet the campaign online, get their activism moved offline, and then maintain contact and continue to spread the word to their friends online, thereby expanding the number of people within the campaign’s universe.

Technology is providing us with great new tools in the toolbox that break down barriers and open up new lines of communication and activism. But it is still only one tool of many, and offline action is still the bread and butter of politics. Good campaigns learn how to use the internet to augment what is happening offline. Those that don’t, end up like Ron Paul.

GYM: With MTV still having huge influence o Gen-Y, do you see them as a positive or negative authority for this years upcoming election?

Mike: I don’t really see MTV as an authority at all. They’ve done a few very interesting things this year, for sure, like the interviews with veterans, and the debates they held in partnership with MySpace, which for my money were actually the most participatory and informative debates of the cycle. But realistically, young people aren’t going to vote one way or another based on what MTV says or a single program they saw on the network. They are going to vote because their friends encouraged them or shamed them into it. They are going to cast their ballot based on their values and those of their peer network. It’s those personal connections that make up our politics and they are far more influential than any celebrity or TV network in determining how –and whether – we cast our ballots.

GYM: Mike you are now off the Gen-Y Hot Seat. Check back everyday this week for the rest of the series with Sarah Burris, Kevin Bondelli and Craig Berger.