Last Tuesday evening, I did what political junkies do: I stayed up late to watch the mid-term election results. With the Senate race in my home state of Virginia too close to call between Republican incumbent George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb, I finally went to bed disappointed at 4 a.m. The Virginia election would ultimately determine which party controls the Senate for the next two years and with it, the congressional agenda. When Sen. Allen finally conceded defeat Thursday, Webb's margin of victory was a mere 8,805 votes, yet the only thing not scrutinized by the mainstream media was how Webb achieved his victory.
The fact that the relatively unknown Jim Webb unseated the wildly popular former governor and incumbent Sen. George Allen is a testament to a new phenomenon: the voting power of college students. It is crucial to note that Jim Webb had a lot of help from Sen. George Allen, who displayed the most impressive act of self-destruction in national politics in recent history. While CNN, Fox News and the Washington Post have spent the week blaming Sen. Allen's loss on his various campaign gaffes, from the notorious "macaca" moment (when George Allen called a Webb volunteer of Indian descent "macaca," a type of monkey, on camera), to awkwardly handling the revelation of his Jewish roots, to the debate on whether "nigger" was a mainstay of his college vocabulary, no mention was made of the disproportionate vote for Webb on Virginia's largest college campuses as the ultimate cause of this election upset.
Three of Virginia's largest colleges — the University of Virginia, George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University — with a combined student population of 80,000 students, arguably can take credit for the outcome of this election. The counties hosting the universities voted for Webb at rates of 77 percent, 59 percent, and 72 percent respectively, translating to a 15,000-vote margin in his favor. Given the fact that a large majority of the remaining counties favored Sen. Allen or split evenly, it is reasonable to say that the large college vote for Webb ultimately shifted this election in his favor.
A further explanation for this historic college student turnout was the ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage, similar to Wisconsin's amendment. This initiative has been used successfully by Republicans across the country to motivate their base of reliably conservative voters on Election Day. However, the unintended consequence in Virginia was an increase in predominantly liberal college students voting. While the gay-marriage ban passed overwhelmingly, 57 percent to 43 percent, a strong network of "Vote No" campus groups, similar to our sidewalk-chalking friends in Madison, emerged to help increase voter turnout. Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia had campus-wide rallies against the gay-marriage ban leading up to Election Day. While these efforts failed at preventing the ban, the increased number of liberal-leaning voters at the polls swung the closely contested Senate seat to the Democrat.
While neither Webb nor Allen vigorously courted the college vote, it is manifestly clear that our demographic has become a force to be reckoned with. As nationwide college student apathy has been blamed as recently as 2004 for Democratic woes such as John Kerry's failed bid for president, it has been demonstrated that with reasonable turnout, we can seriously alter the course of our elected government. By continuing to flex our electoral muscles, politicians will finally be forced to appeal to students and be held accountable for neglecting issues paramount to us. As loan interest rates and government funding of public universities top many of our political agendas, we cannot afford to revert to our apathetic ways in the next election cycle.
Most importantly, for the last two rounds of elections, the rights and integrity of gays have been politicized by Republicans to motivate their conservative base to get out the vote. We can thank Virginia's college students for beginning to apply the brakes to the reckless overuse of the gay marriage issue, as the collateral damage in this election far outweighed the benefits for Republicans. It now appears that the only "macaca" in this Virginia upset is the architect, Karl Rove, whose failed get-out-the-vote scheme cost his party the U.S. Senate. I am sure he will spend the next two years developing a new exploitive ballot measure to motivate the conservative base; but in the meantime, we, the college students, can bask in the political glory of the fact that we finally matter.
Will Smith ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in political science and religious studies.
