Call them the dissed generation–disengaged, disinterested and disaffected–around election time, anyway. They’re America’s 18- to 30-year-olds, and some are even bored of hearing how bored they are.
“When I come to these things my parents always ask, `Were you the youngest there?'” said Ray Carroll, 24, in the Starbucks parking lot across from Wrigley Field last weekend, where a group of Republican Young Professionals met for a field trip to distribute campaign materials on the Northwest Side.
Well, he was the youngest there that day. “A lot of people my age have gotten lackadaisical,” Carroll admitted.
Some of his compatriots see opportunity in apathy.
“Younger people are starting their careers, they’re focused on saving money, starting a family. They’re not looking for anything from government,” said Doug Ibendahl, 39, state coordinator and co-founder with his fiance, Cathy Santos, of Republican Young Professionals. “That’s exactly the kind of sentiment we’re trying to tap into. That’s exactly why they should be voting Republican.”
Even so, no one seems to be gaining overall from the glazed expressions that politics draws from many young people. This, despite the fact that both parties need every vote they can get Tuesday. Control of the U.S. Senate hangs even more delicately in the balance since a plane crash killed Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) just over a week ago. The suspense is similar in the state Senate; a few close races threaten Republican control.
Politicians talk the talk about engaging younger voters. But many, aided and abetted by their consultants, have become privately convinced that the way to go is to skew older. Thus, the populace is inundated with ads about Social Security and Medicare, not college financial aid or the environment.
But the neglect goes both ways.
In an aside at a fundraiser Tuesday, Rahm Emanuel, 5th District Democratic candidate for the U.S. House, said his campaign stops at “L” platforms are a study in generational contrasts. At the Jefferson Park stop, older commuters will pause for a chat with him. At the Belmont stop, the young commuters will have none of it, he said.
That points to a broader withdrawal.
“For 30 years, young voters have been pulling back from the electoral arena,” said Thomas E. Patterson, a Harvard political scientist and author of “The Vanishing Voter” (Knopf, $25). “In 1972 turnout was 50 percent among 18- to 30-year-olds. It was barely above 30 percent in 2000. That’s a big drop even in the context of a general decline.”
Interest flags further in non-presidential elections. In 1974, 30 percent of 25-year-olds voted, according to a recent study by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. On Tuesday, 23 percent are expected to vote.
So what’s the chicken and what’s the egg? Should we blame the politicians who fail to relate to young people’s interests? Or the young who fail to relate any interests to candidates? Is the problem an electoral system rooted in money, and young people don’t have it?
Blame a little of all that, and more.
“We’re trying to dispel the engrained cynicism among campaign staff and candidates themselves that young adults aren’t worth going after,” said Adam Anthony, project director of the nonpartisan Campaign for Young Voters in Washington, D.C. “What we tell candidates is to look beyond broad numbers to specific potential.”
That potential is somewhere around 30 million adults under 30 who did not vote in the last presidential election. One survey estimated that 90 percent of 15- to 25-year-olds don’t have strong political allegiances, Anthony said, which creates a vast pool for conversion to either side.
As an example of their power, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) has credited University of Wisconsin at Madison students for her narrow victory in two races. She helped create one tool kit with suggestions for reaching young voters; Anthony’s project offers another. (Among his suggestions: Janet Reno types should not attempt to seem hip or cool–young people will only laugh, not vote.)
Without a doubt, it takes money and some savviness to reach young people. They’re not the ones paying hundreds of dollars a plate at political fundraisers.
Along with free drinks at a recent Democratic Youth to the Booth event at Rive Gauche nightclub in Chicago, young Democrats were offered a $200 stipend to board buses this weekend to Missouri and South Dakota, sites of key Senate races, for a get-out-the-vote effort.
The adventure of a road trip might have been persuasive enough if it weren’t midterm-exam time, said Tina Valkanoff, 21, president of the College Democrats at Northwestern University, who was hoping to ride along to Missouri. “I’ll have 700 pages of reading to do in between,” she said.
Instead of focusing on the Budweiser generation, with its what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life preoccupation, some say the Butterfinger types–grade-schoolers–are the ones that could reverse democracy’s rumored demise.
That’s partly where the problem starts, after all, said Pat Feichter, 57, a former teacher and the state director of a new national, nonpartisan organization called Freedom’s Answer.
“Schools are missing the boat,” he said. “There needs to be a lot more teaching in the area of what we call civic education. That’s different than just government. That’s what they get taught in school–that there are three branches of government . . . but what do we do to teach them responsibilities of citizenship?”
Freedom’s Answer goes to high schools with programs such as “Adopt a Block,” which asks teens to obtain pledges from registered voters to go to the polls Tuesday.
One theory behind Freedom’s Answer and other such programs is that “early” translates to “often.” If young people are vested even before they can vote, they will exercise the right when it comes along.
“If you get them to the polling booth once, there’s a good chance they’ll come back,” Patterson said. “If they go through two or three or four elections without participating, there’s a good chance they won’t, period.”
Feichter said there’s often a sudden onset of interest in the electoral process when people start buying homes and paying taxes. But that’s based on personal economics.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if they had the reason of caring about their country as the basic reason?” said Feichter. “If you can get them to be good citizens as young people, that will stay with them forever.”
Even children need some incentives, though. Freedom’s Answer representative Dominique Scott, 17, worked with West Chicago Community High School officials to give students a few reasons to get involved. The one who turns in the most voter pledge forms will get a week of reserved parking at school, for instance. And for students who turn in at least one pledge form, the school’s no-hat policy will be waived the day after the election.
“Hats are a big thing for adolescents–hats make or break an outfit,” Scott explained to a clueless adult.
If that’s not elementary, it’s political science 101: Know your constituency.
Why they don’t vote
Here’s the Cliffs Notes version of what keeps young people from the polls, according to Harvard University’s Thomas E. Patterson and Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
Culprit No. 1: Peace and relative prosperity. “There hasn’t been a large issue like Vietnam, World War II, the Great Depression; there hasn’t been that shock to the system to get involved,” Patterson said. Sept. 11 was not enough, he said. Turnout was down in fall 2001 and the primaries of 2002 compared with previous similar elections, Patterson said. As Gans explains it: “9/11 brought national patriotism, but what we were asked to do was return to normalcy, buy stocks, spend money, contribute to charities. That was hardly a clarion call to political activism.”
Culprit No. 2: Cable. Beginning in the late ’70s, Patterson said, families stopped defaulting to the evening news because of the explosion of options. “What the cable generation was watching in grade school and high school was a lot of entertainment programming. You don’t see much of a news habit developing.”
Culprit No. 3: Civics education, or lack thereof. Young people aren’t tested as much on current events as previous generations were. Patterson floats the idea of bumping the voting age down to 17 so that the voting process can be reorganized around schools. Gans suggests a mandatory year of national service after high school.
Culprit No. 4: The vicious cycle. Because young people don’t vote, candidates don’t appeal to them or address issues that matter to them. “You’ve got to go where the ducks are,” Patterson said. Even so, he said, that excuse for young people not to vote goes only so far. “There’s barely an issue that touches more than 10 to 15 percent of the electorate.”
Culprit No. 5: Lame public speaking. Candidates don’t deliver the grand “ask not what your country can do for you” speeches anymore. They slice and snipe. That isn’t so corrosive for established voters, Gans said, but it keeps young people away. “When John McCain said that younger people want something larger than the self, he was right,” Gans said. “Idealism made them want to be involved in the ’60s. I don’t see any of that idealism in the current marketplace.”
— W.N.
Why they should vote
A smattering of politically passionate young people and dispassionate numbers from surveys offer these reasons for participation, not just at polls but in campaigns too:
Reason No. 1: National priorities. Older voters are projected to outnumber voters under age 30 by more than 2-1 on Tuesday. That means the generation gap in such matters as Social Security might be underrepresented in the candidates whom voters elect. Three out of five people in their 20s, for example, said in a survey that Social Security should be redesigned so that workers could invest some of their payroll taxes in the stock market. Less than half the Baby Boomers and only one-fourth of people 65 and older feel the same way. That data comes from a recent study conducted by The Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
Reason No. 2: If the nation goes to war, the young are the ones fighting it. When the economy takes a turn for the worse, they’re the ones not getting jobs.
Reason No. 3 (a): Simone Ward, executive director of Young Democrats of America, offers this tidbit gleaned from census data: If 18- to 24-year-old turnout had been just 0.3 percent higher in Florida in 2000, Al Gore probably would have prevailed over George Bush.
Reason No. 3 (b): For those who lean Republican, a slight revision of Reason 3 (a).
— W.N.
