Among the many things that happened last night in Iowa was a very high turnout of young voters. For the last several years NDN and its affiliate the New Politics Institute have been making the case that a new generation of young Americans known as the Millennial Generation was poised to make a tremendous impact on politics.

As background please visit the following resources:

The 50-Year Strategy:

This article lays out a grand strategy for how today's Democrats could build a lasting electoral majority and today's progressives could seize the new media, build off new constituencies like Hispanics and the millennial generation, and solve the urgent governing challenges of our times.

The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation:

In this report, we take a comprehensive look at almost all available surveys and polls that have tried to figure out the politics of this important new generation of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. The cumulative evidence shows that this generation is overwhelmingly progressive and unusually engaged in politics. (Video of an event we did around this report can be found here.)

Politics of the Millennial Generation:

This survey examined in detail the attitudes and behavior of three American generations — the Millennials, Gen-X'ers, and Baby Boomers — and, within the Millennials, three sub-generations, Teen Millennials, Transitional Millennials, and Cusp Millennials. Together the three generations consist of Americans 13-54 years old who were born from 1952-1993.

New Tools: Leverage Social Networks:

The final memo of our 2007 New Tools Campaign lays out how the booming social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace can be used to do many of the old-fashioned fundamentals of politics: branding, voter registration, fundraising, volunteering and voter turnout.

In his New York Times column yesterday Paul Krugman thoughtfully examines the centrality of a great national electoral strategy, the Southern Strategy, to the recent rise of conservatives. It is a story line he explores in much more depth in his very worthwhile new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

In our new article in Mother Jones magazine, The 50 Year Strategy, Peter Leyden and I argue that the progressives and Democrats are in the process of constructing the next great electoral strategy, one yet unnamed, that capitalizes on the emerging demography and politics of the early 21st century.

This new strategy builds upon Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Pacific West, requires Democrats and progressives to win in all the other regions of the country, and builds particularly upon the support of two new demographics that will end being very influential in the 21st century - Hispanics and Millennials.

Implicit in all this is how the concept of race is changing in America. For over 300 years, race in America was a white-black, majority-minority, exploitive experience. The very large wave of immigration America is currently experiencing, driven to a great degree by new Asian and Hispanic immigrants, is changing that historic and pernicious equation. In the age of the Southern Strategy minorities - African Americans - were a small fraction of the population. In America today "minorities" are over 30 percent of our national population. In my lifetime America will become a majority minority nation. Even the word minority itself will begin to change its meaning as American becomes a very different place with a very different people in the 21st century.

To get a sense of all this look at the Presidential fields. Taken together the GOP Presidential candidates look that 20th century Southern Strategy Party. The Democratic field, featuring a woman, an Hispanic, a mixed race candidate of African descent and a white populist from the New South, looks much more like the Party of this next more racially and geographically complicated post-Southern Strategy nation.

For more on the changing nature of America's Hispanic population, check out our new report Hispanics Rising.

One of our recurring areas we look at here is how TV, the dominant medium of politics, is being re-invented. This year the Nielsen ratings system has implemented a new system to better track the impact of DVRs on TV viewing. The Times has a story this morning on Nielsen's progress, well worth reading in its entirety.

An excerpt:

Two weeks into the fall television season, broadcast networks are ensnared in familiar fights over ratings points and demographics. But this year, two new developments have removed much of the meaning from overnight ratings. One, the increasing use of the digital video recorder, has led to the other: ratings for commercials. DVR owners like Sara Morrison, a 26-year-old from Los Angeles, are making audience measurement harder for Nielsen Media Research, the company that calculates audiences for networks and advertisers. “I normally don’t even pay attention to the time slots shows are on,” Ms. Morrison said last week. She almost always fast-forwards through commercials, and because she can record all her favorite comedies and dramas, she hardly ever stumbles upon new shows. Ms. Morrison’s habits are not commonplace, at least not yet. Most television viewing still occurs live, even in DVR-equipped households, according to Nielsen. But the striking rise in DVR ownership — to 20 percent last month from 9 percent in September 2006 — is permanently altering the television playing field...

Might DVR ownership be at 35-40 percent by next year's election? And what does this mean for politics? Will half of all voters next year have the ability to skip through TV commercials? It sure looks like that's where we are headed...