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Monday, Jul 6, 2009
Genuinely inspired, the Facebook generation is turning out to vote in record numbers. Will they make a difference?
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Politics, News, Katharine Mieszkowski, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Mitt Romney
REUTERS/Andy Sullivan
Young voters listen to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at a rally Oct. 29, 2007, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Feb. 2, 2008 | BERKELEY, Calif. -- UC-Berkeley freshman Amy Purvis turned 18 in November and is pumped about voting for the first time -- although she hasn't decided which Democrat she's going to choose on Tuesday. Just before noon on a sunny morning, Purvis, with long brown hair and dangling earrings, strides across campus decked out in a bright red T-shirt that announces "I VOTE." Her arms bear three red, white and blue wristbands that say "VOTE," and she's carrying a bucket of more wristbands. The environmental-economics major, who is from Winters, Calif., is making a beeline to Room 132 in Mulford Hall to a class on soil microbial ecology, but not because she's ready for a lesson on the tiny organisms in dirt. She's headed there to do a "class rap" on voting.
On the chalkboard, Purvis writes, "Don't forget to vote on Super Tuesday," underlining "Super" and "Tuesday." A cheerleader for civic engagement, she stands in front of the class and reminds the 30 students, taking pens and notebooks out of backpacks, that the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary saw a super-high youth turnout. Purvis tells them to take out their cellphones and text-message 10 of their friends the note she's written on the board. "Text all your friends!" she exclaims, tossing a red wristband to the first student who obliges, to appreciative laughs from his classmates. "I'm really psyched about voting, and you should be, too!" she declares. Another four kids take out their phones to heed the voting call.
At campuses across California, students like Purvis are working with CalPIRG, the California Public Interest Research Group, to encourage their friends and fellow students to vote this Tuesday. Already the primaries have seen a new surge of young voters. In New Hampshire, participation more than doubled among voters under age 30, compared to the primary held in 2004. "All the measures of young voter interest in elections are shooting up," says Daniel Shea, a political scientist at Allegheny College. "There is no reason to believe that young voters won't come out in record numbers on Super Duper Tuesday. Young voters are paying attention. They're online. They're blogging. They're talking about the election. They're pumped. So they're going to come out, and they very well may shift the outcome in several states."
Try to imagine that you were still in elementary school when George W. Bush took office, and you'll get a sense of how eager these first-time voters are for a leader to call their own. They know global warming and international fallout from the Iraq war will affect their generation more than anyone else voting in this election. And the issues that affect them the most right now, such as college affordability, have been ignored by Washington for as long as they can remember.
Eighteen-year-old Amber Moller, a society-and-the-environment major at UC-Berkeley, is excited to be a first-time voter this Tuesday. Wearing giant sunglasses and a T-shirt proclaiming "A life without knowledge is death in disguise," the freshman from La Quinta, Calif., just outside Palm Springs, is stationed on Berkeley's Sproul Plaza at lunchtime, recruiting her fellow students for a campaign to fight homelessness. She says her choice for president was tough because the candidates' positions are "very similar," but she settled on Dennis Kucinich because he's "a man of his word." When Kucinich dropped out of the race, Moller decided to vote for Barack Obama. "He's providing hope for the youth, and I think he's going to be a fresh start," she says.
On the Berkeley campus, Moller is a new voter with a lot of company. Students here favor Barack Obama, with 61 percent of them supporting him in an admittedly unscientific League of Young Voters online primary on the social networking site Facebook. Among young voters who participated in the Facebook primary, 48 percent of Californians went for Obama, as did 44 percent of all young people in the United States. On Facebook, which is popular with college students and recent grads, Obama's profile has more than 300,000 friends, while Hillary Clinton's has around 85,000.
Support for Obama has been strong among those under 30 who voted in the real-world primaries and caucuses. In South Carolina, 67 percent of Democratic voters under age 30 cast their ballots for Obama. In Iowa the figure was 57 percent, and in New Hampshire 51 percent, according to CIRCLE (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), a nonpartisan group that studies youth civic engagement. Obama has done especially well with 18- to 24-year-olds, while Clinton has drawn support among working-class 25- to 29-year-olds, beating out Obama in that age group in New Hampshire. On the Republican side, young voters have been all over the map; in Iowa and South Carolina they favored Mike Huckabee, who was popular with young evangelicals; in Nevada, Mitt Romney was their man; and in New Hampshire and Florida, John McCain got the nod.
Next page: One Berkeley Republican is gung-ho for McCain. "Sweet!" cheers a fellow GOP'er
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