With elections less than a week away, state gubernatorial candidates are gearing up for the last leg of the race — but many students seem to have lost interest before the polls even opened.
Students who were on the campus for the 2006 mid-term elections and 2008 presidential elections largely said the university came alive with enthusiasm at election time. But this year, despite an extra push from student organizations to get the university community motivated about voting, many have said the excitement just isn’t there.
Ashley Baratz, a 2009 alumna, said the political activity at the university was memorable in both 2006 and 2008.
“I don’t know if people necessarily cared more in 2006 than they do today, but you could certainly feel the tension between the candidates and the intensity of the race on campus,” she said, noting there was a clear difference between the mid-term and presidential elections in 2006 and 2008.
“Everyone was excited about the promise of change, and political talk around campus was everywhere,” Baratz said. “You couldn’t go into a classroom or public campus setting without hearing political discussion in the weeks prior to the election.”
But this election, the fierce political climate has calmed. Michael McDonald, a government and politics professor at George Mason University, said most young people just don’t appreciate the importance of midterm elections.
“People generally perceive the presidential election to be more important and interesting than midterm elections,” McDonald said. “Young people identify more with the president than state and local government or Congress. Their lives are more directly touched by these elections, and as they get older eventually they will realize that midterm elections are important.”
McDonald explained that about 25 percent of young people vote in midterm elections, while 50 percent come out for presidential elections.
The biggest disparity between the two occurs in the 18 to 29 age group.
For the Democratic Party, the youth vote tends to be particularly important. In a 2008 CBS exit poll, two-thirds of those under the age of 30 voted for President Barack Obama, a Democrat, making the gap between youth voters and all other age groups larger than in any election since the surveys began in 1972.
But the general apathy among university students in a mid-term election isn’t unlike that of the rest of the nation, according to George Washington University political science professor Forrest Maltzman.
“In general, interest in mid-term elections is always less than in presidential elections,” Maltzman said. “It’s not just students or your campus; It’s everybody.”
Maltzman added the youth vote can be crucial to elections, and a low turnout of youth voters could swing elections one way or the other, citing 2008’s presidential election as evidence.
“Barack Obama did extremely well in large part because he brought voters out of the woodwork who had never voted before,” Maltzman said. “These people were mainly the young and minorities.”
Many students said their apathy was due to a general disinterest in the midterm elections because many feel these elections are not as important as presidential elections.
Emily Mize, a junior accounting and information systems major, said although she is voting via absentee ballot, most students she’s talked to are not planning to cast a ballot.
“Most people I know aren’t voting, and there doesn’t seem to be a large presence on campus encouraging students to vote,” Mize said. “Most of my friends just don’t care; they don’t see these elections as really having much impact on them.”
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