If the Democrats don't get the youth vote, they're toast. That happened in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, where young Obama voters stayed home in droves. It's an ugly conceivable future portended by
a new Harvard poll that shows forty-one percent of young Republicans planning on voting in November, compared to 35 percent of young Democrats and 13 percent of independents. A
recent Pew poll showed a similarly disturbing pattern: Young voters still prefer the Democrats, but their margin is slipping and their enthusiasm level is worse.
Some reasons and some solutions:
The Democrats need to tackle youth joblessness. They've passed important changes in student financial aid, like income-contingent loan repayment. Most students and recent students don't know about them, and they need to. But with youth unemployment at near-record levels, it's understandable that young men and women would feel angry and frustrated. If the Democrats want to keep this generation, they need to pass major jobs bills, probably through reconciliation, since the Republicans seem to be only too eager to leave young voters demoralized and unemployed. It would be nice if the Obama administration were leading on this more strongly, but since aren't leading strongly enough, the push to make jobs the top priority has to come from the grassroots. This happened in the 1930s under Roosevelt. Seventy-five years later, I can visit a Works Progress Administration-created library or go for a run on a Works Progress Administration-created boardwalk, and reap the benefits of programs that also gave millions of people desperately needed jobs. We need to make equivalent investments now, targeted at those who need jobs the most. It also wouldn't hurt to address the drastic lack of health insurance among all but the most affluent youth, to avoid a further Afghan quagmire, and to stand up more strongly, and with less apology and with less apology and deference toward those who have no interest in solutions, on all the other issues that matter.
But we need more than specific programs. We need to give people a renewed sense of why involvement matters. Absent a sense of how social change has occurred in the past and can again, it's tempting to give up when you've barely begun, all the more in an instant attention and instant gratification culture. Given that few of us know the stories of how previous citizen activists persisted and prevailed, it's understandable that many who were acting so passionately just over a year ago feel adrift and unable to make an impact. That's true of more experienced activists, but it's particularly true of those for whom the Obama campaign was first step into trying to create a more humane common future. Those of us who've been involved longer (including veteran youth activists) need to offer this perspective, to help those more recently involved avoid
cynical resignation and withdrawal.
We need these lapsed activists and particularly lapsed youth activists, because they're the ones who will reach out to their peers. During the 2008 election, you could go anywhere in battleground states and find efforts to engage young voters. In the Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts elections, the campaigns largely ignored them and the parallel independent efforts that might have filled the gap didn't exist. Without being reached by these more personal approaches, young voters were left more isolated, more readily manipulated by 30-second ads, and more likely to simply stay home. As I explore in my
Soul of a Citizen book, change works best when people approach those they already know, within familiar contexts. And when campaigns, movements, and their supporters reach out in ways that offer a chance for genuine dialogue. Some of this can be through social media--we need the texting, Facebooking, and other networking that helped the Obama campaign bloom. But these approaches work best when complemented by more visible public actions and more direct personal dialogue. If we're going to enlist those who once acted and speak to their legitimate discontents, we're going to need to recreate this one-on-one reach, and begin to recreate it now, not just in the last two weeks of the campaigns.
As the recent surveys imply, the stakes in this are huge--not just for now or for November, but for the ongoing allegiance and participation levels of a generation. Whether citizen activists can help the Obama administration and the Democrats reengage those who carried them to victory in 08 will shape American politics not just in the coming year, but for decades to come. The Obama administration can play a critical role in demanding action on issues that affect young voters' lives. The Congress can use all available options, including Reconciliation, to pass them. But it's up to the rest of us to offer the examples of connection, context, and continued commitment.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of
Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, whose wholly updated new edition will be released March 30, of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. See
www.soulofacitizen.org To receive his articles directly email
sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles. To sign up for the weekly excerpts of Soul that HuffPo will be running on the book page each Thursday visit
www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-loeb
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