Jun 26 2008
Student Starts GOP Web Site
No, not Carolina Politics Online.
DURHAM - Abby Alger mentioned she was a Republican during a dinner gathering one night. A friend quickly apologized to the rest of the group on her behalf.
“Saying you’re a Republican is kind of saying a dirty word,” said Alger, a rising senior at Duke.
To Alger, 20, a public policy major from New York, this reflexive recoiling is a result, at least in part, of Republican party doctrine that doesn’t ring true to college-age people, even those who may lean to the right on many issues. It is the impetus behind Real World Republicans, a new Web site and blog Alger co-founded to encourage young people to discuss politics outside the echo chamber.
The www.realworldrepublicans.com site went live last week. Alger hopes her target audience — the 16- to 25-year-olds known as Generation Next — will use the site to talk about the election, health care, Iraq and other issues. The discussions will be serious, but she doesn’t intend them to be lectures. It should be fun, even quirky. The home page features 10 multicolored elephants — a modern twist on the staid GOP icon.
Good for her. Blogs like this one are only going to increase in importance. I checked out her site and it looks pretty interesting. I only wonder how she managed to get a write-up in the N&O, while CPO has to get by on word-of-mouth? Who do we talk to about our own article???
Alger thinks many people her age have a mishmash of values spanning the political spectrum, voters who can be snared by either major party. She points to a 2007 Pew Research Center for People & The Press study of Generation Next, which found many young people support gay marriage and accept interracial dating, but are also less critical of government regulation of business and are more likely than other generations to support privatization of Social Security. The report, citing other Pew studies, said just 35 percent of these young people identify more with the Republican Party.
I think the Republican Party is in deep trouble if it doesn’t drop its Theocon and Drunken Sailor wings and get back to a more Coolidge/Goldwater/Reagan conservatism; a quasi-libertarian, small-government, liberty-first platform. I wish this young lady luck in her efforts to do just that.
Thank you for the good wishes and good mention.
In answer to your question, the N&O reporter contacted me for the story. Real World Republicans received some attention in online national news thanks to my boss, David All, the co-founder of the site and a Republican web 2.0 consultant. I can’t claim any credit. So the story of the blog spread from there–and now there’s even a mention of the site in some online newspaper in Tasmania.
As an interesting aside, the biggest spike in traffic came from the N&O story (thank you Google Analytics for that data). I guess it proves what we already know: North Carolinians just do something extra and better. And I say this as a now-official North Carolinian (and reformed Yankee), having paid my state taxes on April 15–the true test of citizenship!