Although young voters represent a large pool of potential support for candidates at the polls, many experts say the problem of student political apathy remains a troubling dilemma despite efforts to get out the student vote.
The decline in overall voter turnout is also visible among young people, who have always been a difficult group to turn out on Election Day.
“Historically, young voters have always been hard to mobilize. It’s probably because people at that age are just too busy,” Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political-science professor, said.
Franklin attributed voter apathy among young people as largely due to instability in the lives of college-age individuals who live without the strong ties to people or places they develop on later in life.
“Turnout tends to increase when people settle into careers, have children and buy houses. Before that, people tend to see themselves as just passing though the places they live and don’t feel a stake in the community they are living in,” he said.
The Vietnam War sparked a notable increase in student activism as young people were moved to participate politically in order to confront the draft and take a stand on what was widely perceived as a moral issue. Since then, however, it has been left up to individual campaigns to entice young people to the polls.
Yet even campaigns that specifically target college students find a difficult time getting substantial returns for their effort. Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean centered a large portion of his campaign efforts on young people during the Wisconsin primary, yet lost the student vote on the University of Wisconsin campus.
Franklin argues that in the end, a candidate can try to elicit student support as part of a larger plan to get out the vote but cannot rely on young people alone to elect them to office.
“As a source of volunteers, they remain invaluable. But as a source of votes, you need the masses to trump to the polls for you,” Franklin said. “Trying to mobilize non-voters is very difficult to make pay off.”
One of the largest problems in getting students to the polls is that students’ interests, such as keeping tuition low and increasing access to higher education, do not necessarily coincide with the major concerns of the general public.
Additionally, Franklin said student apathy is also often the product of a chicken-and-egg phenomenon, where candidates do not focus on student concerns because young people don’t vote in large numbers. Young voters, in turn, do not go to the polls because candidates do not campaign on those issues they care about.
Although getting students out to vote remains a continuing problem on the electoral landscape, groups on campus are currently working hard to round up young potentials to register them to vote for the 2004 election.
The Associated Students of Madison has initiated the Vote 2004 campaign in conjunction with other campus organizations, such as Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group, the New Voters Project and both the College Democrats and the College Republicans in a bipartisan effort to register young voters.
The effort was successful at getting 1,500 registered for the Democratic primary and is hoping to fulfill its goal of 17,000 new voters registered by Nov. 2 for the presidential election.
The coalition’s effort to get out the student vote uses a two-pronged approach of educating students about candidates and getting them registered and ready to cast their ballot Election Day. The registration effort targets new voters in particular to pave the way for them to continue with future civic engagement.
“Statistics have shown that once a person is registered to vote, they are more likely to continue to vote throughout their lives,” Ariane Strombom, head of ASM’s Vote 2004 campaign, said.
