In presidential election, youth vote a question mark
Published on page one of the Nov. 7, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
Children are the future, but young adults may be the key to the next presidential election.
It may be that children are the future, but young adults are likely to be the key to the next presidential election.
Voters in their late teens and twenties played an active role in the 2008 presidential election. This time around, however, young people are noticeably less engaged, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan data-gathering organization.
Just 13 percent of Millennials (the generation that is now between 18 and 30 years old) have given a lot of thought to the 2012 candidates, down from 28 percent four years ago. And 17 percent are following election news very closely, down from 24 percent in the fall of 2007.
College-aged voters in Keene are well aware of the trend.
"Politics is a taboo for our generation. They see it as nasty. They see a lot of lying, they see a lot of infighting and they don't want to get involved," said Jordan Posner, 22, president of the Keene State College Democrats.
On Sunday, one year to the day before the 2012 election, representatives of Posner's group and the Keene State College Republicans marked the occasion with an event on campus.
They sat together at a long table between the school's dining area and the student center. It was a sunny afternoon, but a sharp wind ruffled fliers for President Barack Obama and the many Republican presidential candidates alike.
Students hurried by with barely a glance toward their politically minded classmates.
"There are a lot of students who are disinterested. They have classes and social lives and Washington, D.C., seems really far away," said Allison Bedell, 19, vice chairman of the college Republicans.
Her classmates' lack of enthusiasm frustrates her, she said, particularly because the problems with the country's debt and struggling economy are likely to take a long time to fix.
"We're the generation that's going to be inheriting all these issues," Bedell said.
The lack of engagement by young people may be a particular problem for Obama, the Pew Study notes. Young people overwhelmingly supported his campaign in 2008, and he is the candidate most likely to lose votes if they decide to sit out the coming election.
"He ran such a great campaign last time, it made it cool to be interested in politics," Keene 18-year-old Alexandra D. Schuman recalled.
Schuman was too young to vote in 2008, but she remembers participating in a mock primary at Keene High School. And this year she is spending her time before she starts college in January as a volunteer organizer for Obama's reelection campaign, as part of the campaign's "Fall Fellows" program.
Part of her job will be to help build support for the president among Keene's youngest voters. But she may have a challenge ahead of her.
Millennials still favor Obama over Republicans Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in polls, but their enthusiasm for the president who ran on a campaign of hope and change has waned.
Shortly after the 2008 election, 81 percent of Millennials said Obama made them feel hopeful and 80 percent felt proud. Today, only about half of that generation say Obama makes them feel hopeful or proud -- a drop of about 30 percent.
"I was excited for the change at the beginning but now I'm not sure about his policies," said Sarah E. Gelotte, 19, a history and education major at Keene State.
She questioned the president's decision to get involved in the war in Libya, wondering if the United States had overstepped its role in that country.
A registered Republican, Gelotte said she plans to vote in the presidential primary but has not yet researched the candidates.
Joe Frechette, 23, said he hasn't been paying attention, either.
"I don't know if any candidate is going to just change America. We're in such a free-fall right now," he said, adding that the state of the economy doesn't leave people his age with a lot of optimism. "We're being preached to about how hard it's going to be to get jobs out of college."
Frechette, who said he gets his news from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," thinks he might vote for Romney in 2012 if the candidate gets the nomination. But he is open to the idea of another term for Obama.
"I feel like he gets a lot of criticism, but he kind of got put in a bad position," Frechette said of the president.
He also had a formula for what a candidate needs to do to capture the enthusiasm of young voters.
"They need to be real when they are in public and speak -- not so by-the-book," he said. "Maybe that doesn't make any sense."
But making sense of that suggestion may be the key to becoming the next president of the United States, or to staying in the White House.
tagged with: politics, presediential election, young voters
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