[Editor’s note: This is the first story in a biweekly series highlighting the impact of the presidential election on college students.]
With a single text message and e-mail alert last week, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama not only announced his running mate selection but also served notice that younger voters will be playing a historically unprecedented role in the presidential race this fall.
But while the extent of college students’ excitement for the Nov. 4 election has been well documented, the young demographic’s breadth of knowledge on certain key issues, such as the economy and health care, remains uncertain.
In the next two months, a handful of student groups at the university will take aggressive measures to increase voter turnout and knowledge of the issues among students.
Senior Grace Thompson, the former president and current treasurer of the Republican Women at Maryland, summed up a major obstacle facing student groups’ efforts to increase voter awareness this fall.
“The economy is huge for students. A lot of my friends are concerned they’re not going to find work. There’s a tough job market. How do you get students interested in that sort of thing when there are issues like the war and the environment that are more tangible? That’s going to be a huge challenge for us,” said Thompson, a government and politics major.
Thompson can take comfort that according to a Harvard University Institute of Politics survey of 18-to-24-year-olds released last month, more young voters cited the economy as the most important issue facing this country than any other issue.
Thirty-nine percent of the 1,031 people surveyed between July 28 and August 12 thought the economy takes precedence in this election, with Iraq coming in second at 15 percent.
But for some students, like College Democrats president John Allenbach, there is no assurance the rest of the student body fully understands that the next president will be controlling economic policy that will impact them into their post-college, fully independent adult years.
“For me, I’m starting to see that I’m going to go out in the world,” said Allenbach, a junior government and politics and marketing major. “That’s a message I’m trying to convey, that these issues aren’t so far away for us.”
The process of buying a home, for instance, might seem ages away for dorm residents or off-campus tenants still hitting up their parents for rent money, yet the 2007 National Realtor’s Association Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers reported 52 percent of first-time home buyers are between the ages of 24 and 35.
Former director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the university, Peter Levine, who holds the same position now at Tufts University, has extensively researched the civic and political motivation of 18-to-25-year-olds.
Levine coordinated a study last year in which he talked to nearly 400 students at 12 college campuses, and said students were “quite concerned and personally involved with issues,” but still noticed a tendency for students to hold off on extensive political awareness until later in life.
“There is a degree in thinking that maybe being involved in politics is something you can postpone until you graduate. Sometimes college students will talk about putting political life on hold,” Levine said.
Allenbach, certainly not one of those politically indifferent students, agreed with Levine’s observation and pointed out concrete evidence that students need to wake up and follow the issues right now.
“Health care no one thinks of as an issue that affects young people. It’s something that hits us even more than it hits the rest of the population,” Allenbach said, citing a 2007 Commonwealth Fund study that found that 13.3 million of the 45 million Americans without basic health insurance in 2005 were between the ages of 19 and 29.
Regardless of how much Allenbach’s Republican counterpart Chris Banerjee might disagree with him on the issues surrounding the presidential campaign, Banerjee – the College Republicans’ president – echoed Allenbach’s sentiment that a shortsighted view of this election is flawed.
“[Many students] just think, ‘How will this affect me now?’ But really the policy any politician puts into effect remains long after those politicians are gone. Whatever you think of George Bush, the laws he got passed, the judicial appointments, as well as the legacy of the Iraq War, those will endure for many years, perhaps decades. Even the tax cuts are scheduled to go beyond President Bush’s second term,” Banerjee said. “Whether Barack Obama or John McCain become president, they have very diverging views of what’s best for the country.”
Just because not all students are entirely focused on the issues does not mean they are not interested in the election, as was pointed out by Ronald Walters, a professor of government and politics at the university who also held a senior role in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run.
“It’s a combination of both the inspiration of the leadership and the issues [young voters] are drawn to,” Walters said while in Denver for the Democratic National Convention last week.
Yet despite the much-hyped youth excitement, along with the projection that the young voting demographic will report to the polls in higher numbers than ever before this November, another government and politics professor at the university, Paul Herrnson, maintained young voters’ ability to influence the overall election results can be blown out of proportion.
“It’s easy to overstate the impact of younger voters, because many of the same things that bring those voters out in larger numbers are also bringing out other voters,” Herrnson said, pointing out that the survey results showing young voters’ emphasis on the nation’s economic woes merely reflects the views of voters of all ages.
Whether the 18-to-24-year-old demographic makes or breaks this election, as well as whether Republican presidential nominee McCain decides to match Obama in his attempts to appeal to young voters, remains in question.
But the necessity to become a more informed voter, in the eyes of junior government and politics major Sterling Grimes, could not be clearer.
“I would like to see students really get deeper into why they are voting,” said Grimes, the Student Government Association vice president of Academic Affairs, who also coordinates the university’s chapter of Students for Barack Obama. “We are the people who are going to be inheriting everything that is happening right now.”
bpenn@umd.edu