Chicago Activists Re-Ignite Young Voters

I remember turning 18 just days before the cut-off for registering to vote in the Presidential election. That was more years ago than I care to admit, but I am still a kid as defined by many young voter advocates, who define this age group as from 18 to anywhere between 24 and 35. I've never missed a major election since and I assumed that was the way with all young people. I was wrong. We young voters are the least likely to vote; what's more, just over half (51.3%) of the entire voting age population cast a vote for President in the last election.

It is easy to blame nonvoters alone for this trend. However, in a representative democracy that depends on people voting, this is a dangerous trend that voters and nonvoters can both learn from. This is particularly important for the young, who inherit the mistakes of the leaders we put (or don't put) into office now.

Underlying the most common arguments for not voting, "The candidates are all the same," " My vote doesn't really matter," "The system is too corrupt to be changed through the electoral process," "None of the issues that matter to me matter to those guys,"--there are three major reasons at the heart of why intelligent and involved young people don't vote:

1. Anything less than a complete paradigm change is meaningless and only prolongs a corrupt system (a.k.a. "I am making a greater political statement by not voting.")
2. To us, there isn't a meaningful difference between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party (a.k.a. "They are all old white guys.")
3. We're "throwing our votes" at the dream of a mulit-party system (a.k.a. "I voted for Nader and I'll do it again, even if my vote doesn't count.")

Paradigm change or bust--lessons learned from the SDS

So, how likely are we to be able to work far outside the electoral system to make sustainable change that will favor the ideals that young people care about? What happens when we ignore the function of the electoral system in electing our nation's officials? To answer this, we can learn a great deal from those who have traveled this route before. Sixties activism has left us with more than cries of "hell no we won't go" and "make love not war." It has also left the impression that this era was the pinnacle of organized student involvement. Today's students, however, have more power now than ever before, with an opportunity to avoid the fatal flaw that brought down the free-thinking, socially conscious groups of that time.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) started with a handful of young intellectuals. In 1962, its 60 founding members adopted the Port Huron statement, a manifesto that criticized the hypocrisy of the American political system. SDS rallied behind the belief that a nonviolent youth movement could transform U.S. society into a fully participatory, democratic model in which the people controlled social policy. It was part of a larger youth movement called the New Left, led mainly by liberal arts and graduate students of some of the country's most elite schools.

SDS became popular at a time when liberals and the Democratic party were firmly ensconced in power and the right wing as we know it was very, very marginalized. In such a suffocating but liberal environment, SDS asked tough questions such as how to create space for different perspectives and how to teach people to participate in democracy. Michael Ansara, a key founder of SDS at Harvard, says that at the time, "Our view was that you would do that largely outside the electoral system. So SDS really didn't have an electoral program."

From '62 to '68, SDS grew from a handful of members to nearly 400,000 with many more who weren't members but identified with SDS and their causes. The group grew without precedent or much support. Ansara said when he approached professors on the Vietnam War, they neither cared about the war nor how to protest it. Yet young people felt enormous pressure from contemporary social events. Ansara said between '64 and '72, he woke up every day worried "if I didn't make the right choice and do the right thing more people were going to die and it was our responsibility to stop it."

He says that in many ways the leaders of SDS, himself included, were naïve. This naïveté was probably, in part, due to doing something that was so unprecedented and that had so little support. At that time, there were no community organizers that had been doing this work for 50 years to share wisdom and advice. According to Ansara when he passed out SDS fliers on the Harvard campus using direct quotes from President Johnson to show he was lying about the war, the students would respond, "You may possibly have a point about our policy in Vietnam, but the President of the U.S. never lies."

"Young people today don't start with that fantasy," Ansara says, and this isone way that student groups of today have a real advantage in their organizing.

The SDS attitude towards the 1968 elections proved their undoing. Many SDS members were too radical for either the McCarthy or Kennedy campaigns and when, on election day, it was Nixon versus Vietnam-tepid Humphrey, the SDS position was "a pox on both of your houses." As a result, they didn't work to defeat Nixon. "You don't know then and you can't go back, but in that year, the New Left floundered and failed in a very significant way and I look back on that year with enormous hindsight regret," says Ansara.

"In some ways the radical right gives us a better model [of how to create sustainable change] than SDS," says Ansara. "The radical right understood that you had to build both nationally and locally; that you had to build not just around specific issues, though you had to act on and mobilize around specific issues, you had to create a value-based political movement that created a world view and acted toward that at all times. At the same time they understood that you had to contend with electoral power and win elections."

Of course, he reminds us, they had a lot going for them, such as vast amounts of resources, "but the resources alone doesn't explain their success. You can have very well funded campaigns that aren't successful."

The rise of the radical right occurred over the last 30 years, after the collapse of the New Left. The result was the radicalization of the Republican Party with no one on the other side, no radical left, to balance it out. "Can elections change the world?" asks Ansara., "We are seeing how they can change the world for the worse."

Ansara summarizes, "From SDS you can learn from the mistake of turning our back on the electoral arena and how important that is in shaping policy. Politics, whether we like it or not, is the way that a society shapes its futures and makes its decisions."

Democrats and Republicans and our generation

If we learn from the mistakes of the past and decide that getting involved in electoral politics is important, there is still the question of whether either of the candidates represent the interests of the young voter.

Washington-based pollster Cornell Belcher says that younger voters' interests are more narrow than older voters' interests. Young voters are concerned about the lack of job creation, vanishing opportunities to make it into the middle class, and the ongoing expense of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

Though to many of the young-voter organizations the answer seems obvious, ("Kerry or bust!"), the younger generation is actually far more undecided than their parents or grandparents. With the expected rise in young voter numbers in this election and the closeness of the last and the next Presidential election, young voters are the new swing voters to watch.

A Gallup pole conducted last November shows that younger voters identify themselves as more "liberal" than their older counterparts. That doesn't mean that the young just vote Democrat, though. According to an August poll of voters under 30 done by Newsweek.com/Genext, the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, was only leading by 9 points, or 50 percent, compared to the 41 percent that chose incumbent George Bush.

Even in the African-American community, a group decidedly more Democrat-leaning, young voters are more undecided. According to a 2002 survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 63 percent of African-American voters consider themselves Democrats, while 24 percent call themselves Independents; 10 percent call themselves Republicans. Among voters 18-35, the percentage of those calling themselves Democrats drops to 54 percent, Independent jumps to 30-35 percent, and Republicans drop to nine percent.

No Democrat has ever won the presidency without taking the youth vote, according to RealClear Politics columnist, Morton Kondracke, who claims that this vote is increasingly up for grabs. Young people were Clinton\'s strongest age group. In 1996, voters aged 18 to 29 supported incumbent Democrat Bill Clinton over GOP challenger Bob Dole by a whopping 19 point margin, 53 percent to 34 percent. In 2000, however, Al Gore outpolled Bush by just 2 points in the youngest age group.

One reason that young people may feel that their interests are equally unheard by both parties is because the young are not seen as major contributors to campaigns. In the current system, candidates tend to address issues based on who gives money. Many advocate groups, like MoveOn, are working to change this trend and have helped make this election one where unprecedented numbers of small donations will go to support the presidential candidates.

Still, Ansara reminds us, money has made the political system corrupt. Not because of blatant wrong-doing, but because, as he puts it, "if politics is about marketing, and if marketing is about the money you raise, then politicians have to spend their time wooing rich people." Then, even if it is not their intention, "they find that what they represent is the wealthy people and not the bottom 65 percent and their issues." [Ansara knows first-hand the power of the system to blind those inside it to the influences of money. Despite a very ethical, principled career, he failed to foresee the problems with his role in a money-laundering scheme that was part of efforts to raise money for a 1996 election of the Teamsters reform candidate, Ron Carey.]

Even with supposed campaign finance reforms, raising money continues to be a major part of a politician's job. This presidential campaign is the most expensive one ever, with each candidate having raised approximately a quarter of a billion dollars.

Ansara suggests that, "young people need to not just vote, but to run [for elected office]. If you're not going to be a millionaire, you have to start by running for student council, city council, state office and over time for national office. We need a whole wave of young, socially conscious young people to enter the electoral process as voters and candidates."

The viability of a multi-party system

Ricardo Levins Morales, activist and artist, says in the "Lizard Strategy" that he votes for third-party candidates. He has only done this when he was sure that his second-favorite candidate would safely win. For this presidential election, he is taking a different strategy. There is too much at stake in this election, he suggests, no matter how Bush might win, regardless if he takes the electoral but not the people's vote or if the election is rigged. The only message the rest of the world will hear is, "We support Bush and his policies."

Ansara puts it this way: "That doesn't mean that one transforms the country by electing Kerry, but probably one transforms the world for the worse by reelecting Bush."

Morales encourages third-party voters to consider the 1991 Louisiana Governor's race as a model. In that election the choice people faced was between the Republican nominee David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Democrat-incumbent, a scandal-ridden, corrupt, machine politician Edwin Edwards.

Though it would seem a likely race for the truly thoughtful, liberal candidate to "sit one at home," this might have led to the election of David Duke. The country would have interpreted this as all of Louisiana supporting a known racist. So, a more effective, but honest, strategy was developed. It became a race where people told it like it was. Campaign posters read, "Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard" and bumper stickers stated, "Vote for the Crook, it's important." The result was a successful campaign that did not stoop to lying to the voters. Instead, Morales argues, it was a campaign that revealed the essence of all elections: they are tactical mechanisms that, at best, communicate what you don't stand for.

Though not all political organizers would agree with Morales' first premise, most do agree with the main point of his second: that after a candidate is elected, the work just begins. Morales speaks to younger voters directly when he says, "If the next generation of liberals can hold their own in this election, then it is possible to begin to recreate a political party that stands for something and not just against Bush. We can invite political debate from Democratic insurgents such as Dennis Kucinich whose presidential bid made strides at bringing the liberal agenda back into focus for the Democrats, Ralph Nader whose fair trade agenda resonates with many blue-color workers and middle-class liberals and David Cobb who represents the Green party's presidential choice."

There is no use in blaming, or thanking, third party voters for the results of the 2000 election. However, had the Nader voters cast ballots for Gore instead, it would have shifted the election in his favor. Many Nader voters, according to Eli Pariser from MoveOn, would have preferred Gore over Bush but our current electoral system doesn't work this way. It's all or nothing. In Canada or Britain, where they have a multiple-party system, the Green party would have ended up with representation equal to that of the votes, as would have the Democrats and the Republicans.

Is there hope for a multiple-party system? Many activists believe that there is hope but that we only get closer to such a system by voting for third-party candidates strategically, voting in key elections for a major party candidate closest to your beliefs and then diligently working within the parties to make significant change.

Our growing influence as young voters

In the last Presidential election, young voters were very influential--more because of what they didn't do, unfortunately. In addition to the obvious example of Florida, in New Mexico, Gore won by only 365 votes. Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon and Wisconsin were each decided by less than 8,000 votes. In that election, 15.2 million eligible voters between 18 and 24 did NOT vote. (More than 1/4 of the total eligible voters that did NOT vote in the 2000 election were in the 18-to-24 age group.) Had the young voters come to the polls, they would have changed the course of the last four years.

The polls suggest that this election will be very close again. Ansara says that this election might be determined by a vote differential of less than 500,000 votes spread across a number of states. Young voters will help determine this election, but don't look to the media or the polls to tell you what their influence will be.

Because of the perception of the young as non-voters, they are often written off by both candidates and the larger public, including the media. According to Michael Moore, even the polls rarely take into account the young voter. Most polls survey "likely" voters based on those who have consistently voted in the last few elections, which the very young voter wasn't eligible to do. Most polls also require a primary phone number that is not a cell phone.

The work of many youth-driven activist organizations and voter registration drives is ensuring that the younger voter will be an important demographic in the upcoming Presidential election, especially in battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where thousands of young voters have been registered.

Young people are getting educated, pissed and involved. And, we are taking back the power of the vote. With a little luck and a lot of organizing, we won't stop there.