Liberal blogger Matt Stoller of OpenLeft draws our attention to a new widget produced by Rock The Vote, which he's calling, the "ActBlue for voter registration."

Stoller cautiously concludes that this widget *might* be a big deal and includes some screeners:

I've been playing around with this new widget from Rock the Vote, which lets anyone create their own voter registration program, kind of like Actblue for voter registration. It's potentially groundbreaking, and you can sign up here.

If I mounted a serious voter registration drive on my site, I would be able to keep the contact information of whoever registered. That means that I can contact them the day they vote, and go to politicians and say 'hey, 1834 voters, including 23 in your district', registered to vote through this site. You ought to listen to their concerns.

Stoller shouldn't have been so cautious. This widget is a really big deal, because it's going to help activists do exactly what James Durbin wrote about, "Go where the youth are." Let's dig in a bit more.

When you read about Karl Rove and Lee Atwater's early days as young GOP operatives, they spent a lot of their time traveling to college campuses, training college Republicans how to hold effective voter registration drives. As Karl Rove said back when he had more hair:

“First of all voter registration is probably the most important function that we are undertaking now. We are also seeking to train college students to run voter registration drives and work to involve young people in campaigns. You can’t get a 35 year old to teach the Republican Party how to get the young people…just can’t rely upon it. Young people have to reach other young people and that’s what we’re seeking to do.”

Tomorrow's Karl Rove's and Lee Atwater's need to follow their role models and start registering their friends and colleagues as Republicans.

The campus registration drives should absolutely remain a part of the strategy, but thanks to modern tools like this Rock The Vote widget, we can now go where everyone in college spends a lot of their time: online.

The further we lower the barrier of entry to the democratic process the better (for both sides). However, it's my hope that we'll be able to hold our ground with the Gen Next GOP which we're currently losing.

Paul Kane of the Washington Post has obtained a PowerPoint (PDF file here) which highlights just how close the elections were in 2006 -- most races being decided by less than a few thousand votes.

As reported by the Washington Post, the presentation was prepared by "Sara Taylor, then the director of the White House's political affairs office, to a group of ambassadors in early January during a meeting the diplomats had with Rove in the West Wing."

The slide of the presentation I find most interesting is below or you can find it on page 29 of the PDF file:

More after the jump.

The New York Times has the full story but here's an excerpt...

The year was 1973, and Karl Rove was looking for help — from the Nixon White House.

Tucked away inside 78,000 pages of documents from the Nixon administration, released by the National Archives earlier this week, is a little gem: a strategy memorandum from the man who would go on to become the architect of President Bush’s rise to political power.

Mr. Rove, then a 22-year-old aide on Capitol Hill, was planning a run to become chairman of the College Republicans, a position he would ultimately win twice. So he wrote to Anne Armstrong, then counselor to Nixon. Mrs. Armstrong had been co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, and therefore Mr. Rove’s ultimate boss the previous year when he was executive director of the college group.

* * * *
In his memorandum, Mr. Rove offered suggestions, from having college Republican clubs show “nonpolitical films for fund-raising (e.g. John Wayne flicks, ‘Reefer Madness’)” to developing a “Student Guide to Lobbying” with a “forward by Bush/Nixon.” That, of course, would be the elder George Bush, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, through whom Mr. Rove first met the current occupant of the White House.

Mr. Rove’s memorandum also proposes building a group of “New Federalism Advocates,” modeled on “Friends of Nixon,” a Nixon campaign committee. The group would have representatives from each state who, Mr. Rove suggested, could meet in Washington for “extensive briefings” with top administration officials like John D. Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman.

Of course, readers of this space know that we've been following Karl Rove's advice to reach out to Gen Next voters for quite a while (Karl Rove's clips starts at 00:59):

Mr. Rove -- please do our Party and America's youth a favor and urge the RNC and The White House to reach out to Gen Next once again.

You've tried to penetrate the machine before when you were sitting in our shoes and thought no one was listening. That's how we feel today.

You can change that.