Young people are not taking an active role in politics today, and students and a panel of notable guests discussed why at Tuesday night's American Forum, entitled "The Great Disconnect: Why Young People Don't Vote."
Panelists, moderator professor Jane Hall and an audience of mostly students discussed the role of civic engagement versus voting, the increasingly popular role of the Internet in political campaigns and issues that matter to 18 to 24-year-olds at the semester's second American Forum Tuesday. The event was sponsored by WAMU 88.5 and the School of Communications.
"While participation rates in politics are very depressing, participation rates in volunteerism are exciting," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake of Lake Snell Perry and Associates Inc. According to Lake's research, most young people feel that volunteering in a soup kitchen has a larger impact and is more important than voting.
" It's less that the two parties are dinosaurs, more that the process is," Lake said.
Young people want instant gratification, Mathew Gross, director of Internet Communications for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, said.
Some students said the issues a candidate addresses are more valuable to attracting young people to politics. "Young people don't vote because they're not up to speed on what's going on," said Jason Breslow, a senior journalism student in the audience.
According to a Kennedy Political Institute poll taken last week, "81 percent of college students said they didn't have enough information to make decisions about politics," said Thomas Patterson, director of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard University.
A survey completed by Hall's Politics in the Media class showed that AU students may not fit into this stereotype.
"AU students tend to be a little more politically involved and more involved in volunteerism than students at other campuses," Hall said in an interview after the forum. "So you have a very engaged group here."
Some young people may feel it is not a lack of information about the issues, but rather a lack of issues pertinent to young people.
Time magazine's national political correspondent, Karen Tumulty, said that it is not a matter of finding issues young people care about to get them to vote.
"It's not that bad that young people don't vote," Tumulty said. "The issues don't seem real to young people." Once issues like taxes, healthcare and Social Security matter, "they will vote."
Some stressed the importance of attracting college-aged citizens to the polls.
"Bringing people back into the political process is a critical thing," Gross said. "As a generation gets older, they tend to participate more in politics. If young people - Generation Y - if they all turned out to vote, it would make a huge difference."
This could not happen soon enough, said Torrance Colvin, director of the Voter Empowerment Program of the NAACP and an AU alum.
"The issues out there are affecting young people and in 10 years they will still be affecting young people," Colvin said. "There is a problem that young people aren't voting. Because every decision politicians make affect[s] your lives."
Some students tried to explain why young people don't vote.
"The campaigns don't really reach out to young people," said Karina Sigar, a freshman from Indonesia. "They don't really talk about issues young people care about. And people are just so sick of it. The political situation in the [United] States is so chaotic right now. They just don't care anymore."
While the Internet has been a key factor in getting young people to care about politics in the upcoming primaries, many panelists and students had different takes on the future of democracy.
"Politicians don't speak to young people and young people don't care about politicians," said Spencer Powlison, a junior Washington Semester student from St. Michael's College in Vermont. "I feel like I have a responsibility to [vote] as a citizen. If you're detached and not participatory, you're not living up to your side of the bargain."
Active Howard Dean supporter and youth-voting activist Laura Reznick, a freshman in the School of Public Affairs, agrees.
"I would rather have somebody vote Republican than not vote at all," she said. "Not voting is just so irresponsible."
Howard Dean's Internet campaign is considered popular among young people as well, and some panelists speculated that this might be what the future holds for campaigns aimed at younger generations.
"Most candidates on both sides have Web sites," Hall said, "but they're not really reaching young people. Everybody does see that the Internet is an important way to reach young people."
Other students feel that personal attention from candidates would convince young people to be involved in politics.
"[Candidates] need to earn our vote, find the main issues of young people and address them," said Nathaniel Goldstein, a freshman in SPA. "We could be an important voting block."
The forum was the first to be held in the Greenberg Theatre, in order to make the production more radio-and television-friendly, said SOC Dean Larry Kirkman. It was broadcast live on WAMU and will be shown on C-SPAN in the coming weeks.
