Petrelis Files

Young Dems of America Prez: About Our Membership Numbers . . .

Earlier this month I wrote an entry about the Young Democrats of America membership numbers and the wide disparity between what they claimed their numbers were and a contradictory figure reported in the Bay Area Reporter.

I received a reply from the YDA head David Hardt, who gives a good explanation about the membership stats.

He may be able to justify the very imprecise number of members because YDA by-laws, but I think any political advocacy group saying it speaks for X or Y or Z number of people who belong to the group in some fashion, usually dues-paying, should be able to be more exact in stating the number of members in his organization.

The YDA numbers would have more standing with me if there weren't a 100,000-plus discrepancy in its own memberships stats.

David Hardt's letter, in full:

Hi Michael,

First I wanted to say, I love your blog, I truly believe we need more people like you who are willing to speak out when the main stream media won't.

However, I felt I must respond to your blog about YDA "potentially" inflating membership numbers.

Your original post is below. Our "official" membership numbers are extremely hard to define because so many of our State and local chapters DO NOT require or allow membership roles to be submitted to YDA's National office. This includes both my local chapter of Dallas County and My State, Texas.

So "officially" at our last National convention, only reporting States that did turn in their membership roles we are over 150,000 in membership. But our own internal estimates have us at between 300,000 and 500,000 in membership.

My local chapter of Dallas County has more than 6,000 members on it's roles and this can be verified by our County party. However, none of those 6,000 members are listed with YDA. Not to mention, some Young Democrats Chapters like Colorado are legally prohibited from being "official" members of YDA by their State Parties. So even if we have those membership roles in house, we cannot count them.

So, again, I don't want to be negative to your blog in anyway, because I'm such a true believe in what you do, and as an openly gay activist, I know what your doing is desperately needed.

I only wanted you to be aware that our organization is NOT trying to inflate numbers, we are just in a very awkward place and we have to rely on estimates on how many members we really have. And most importantly, I was elected to represent all of our members, even if they can't legally be counted by their State Party, I will always stand up and fight for everyone of them.

Keep up the great work,

David