College Students Won't Turn Out to Vote
Politico reports:
On college campuses where Barack Obama made politics cool again, most students have moved on.
They’ve quit bugging their friends about change, they’re no longer trying to sign up new voters and the knock-on-door day trips now draw only the most hard-core.
One statistic from Rock the Vote, the most aggressive organization behind youthful political participation, illustrates the difference between now and 2008 — just 280,000 young voters signed up in its midterm elections voter drive, a fraction of the 2.5 million who eagerly put their name on voter forms two years ago.
The bottom line: From coast to coast, universities that brim with liberal ideas and idealistic students won’t be sending nearly as many voters to the polls on Nov. 2. And that’s bad news for Democrats.
In Colorado’s Larimer County, which includes the Colorado State University campus, voter registration drives resulted in 20,000 new voters in 2008. This year, only 1,200 came through.
The story is the same in Virginia’s Albemarle County, which includes 90 percent of the dorms at the University of Virginia. In 2008, 6,171 people registered to vote; only 2,714 new registrations came in this year, a number that could be troubling for the reelection efforts of Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello, who won 2008 thanks in large part to students who turned out for Obama.
A couple of hours away at Virginia Tech, Montgomery County recorded 1,441 new voters, far fewer than the 7,402 who sent in forms in 2008.
Such numbers belie claims by the White House and Democrats that the “enthusiasm gap” is closing and the 2008 hope mojo still runs wild. Obama sounded an optimistic note Thursday, predicting to students at the University of Washington, “If everybody who voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election.”
And when 26,000 students rallied for Obama at the University of Wisconsin and 35,000 came out for him at Ohio State, the Democratic National Committee’s press shop gleefully circulated the numbers to reporters. But without Obama on the ticket, the more important question is not whether students participate in the kind of mass rallies that defined the 2008 campaign but whether any of that enthusiasm is transferable to congressional candidates or a Democrat running for governor.
“It’s really easy to care about Obama or [John] McCain,” said Tom Stanionis, chief of staff of elections at Yolo County, where the University of California’s Davis campus is located. “It’s a lot harder to care about Meg Whitman versus Jerry Brown. There’s not that charisma factor in that, ‘Oh, my God, this is change-the-world time.’”
