Education Costs, Health Care Will Likely Sway Youth Vote

By Adrianna McGinley

Youth leaders and policy experts cited rising costs in education, health care, child care, and housing as key issues for winning the young vote in 2012.

The discussion at the Center for American Progress was based on a recent report from the think tank Demos and the Young Invincibles entitled “The State of Young America”.

Heather McGhee, Demos’ Washington office Director, noted the report shows that while college tuition has tripled over the last few decades, federal aid has been cut in half. A maximum pell grant that she said covered 69 percent of costs in 1980, today only covers 34 percent. She added that in 2010 the amount of student debt surpassed that of credit card debt and 76 percent of participants in the study reported it has become harder in the last five years to afford college.

McGhee said these numbers make young people “more oriented towards public solutions, more willing to pay higher taxes for higher degrees of service from the government than any generation since the depression generation.”

Aaron Smith, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Young Invincibles, said Congress has the power to help youth but only if they make their voices heard. Smith cited Obama’s Affordable Care Act as “an example of how Congress can really step up to the plate and address one of these big long-term challenges,” and added it would be a grave mistake for Congress to repeal it in 2012.

“Going backwards is obviously, I think, exactly the wrong move…we’re going to be doing more work in the Fall to educate young people about what the health care law actually means for them,” Smith said. “Once you have the education I think then you’re prepared to sort of become an advocate, to tell your story, to explain ‘yes…I’m a young person, but healthcare really does matter to my life,’ and we found that when those stories are told, it can be quite powerful and change the political debate.”

The panel also touched on immigration issues.

Eduardo Garcia, Advocacy Associate for Campus Progress, said the 2012 election will depend on how the administration continues to deal with the undocumented population.

“Young people are very much feeling the impacts of some of the harmful deportation policies that the administration has adopted, and I think that it’s especially hurtful because many of those folks turned out in 2008 to get this president elected.”

The panel cited immigration reform as a possible key to economic recovery as well, saying that while 54 percent of all young adults have or want to start a business, that rate for minority youth is over 60 percent.

Ronnie Cho, White House Liaison to Young Americans and Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement, said it is up to youth to make their voices heard.

“It is incumbent upon ourselves to really assert ourselves, not ask for an invitation to be a part of the discussion, because that’s simply not going to happen and it hasn’t happened…that’s why the discussion hasn’t been around how this affects young people,” Cho said. “It is our time to emerge as this force to be reckoned with.”

McGhee added that while young voters need to stand up, the federal government must continue to protect voters rights, citing that in 2010, 31 states passed voter ID laws that could inhibit youth from voting since over a third of 18 year olds do not have a federally issued ID.

Are youth voters political game-changers?

On Tuesday, young voters showed that their generation is "moving from revolutionary to solutionary," said Hip Hop Caucus President, Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. at the Campus Progress event discussing youth voter turnout. Also in attendance was Kat Barr, Political Outreach Director for Rock the Vote; Amanda Carpenter, National Political Reporter for Townhall.com; and David Madland, Director of the American Worker Project for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. The panel discussed the major issues for youth voters such as the economy and the war in Iraq, as well as how to keep the youth civically engaged.

The panelists all agreed that this was a "fundamentally progressive election," and Madland said that this generation is ideologically more progressive than any generation before them. Yearwood compared the election to the Civil Rights Movement because he said that "it became a movement" itself. To keep youth involvement high and in order to "make government transparent," he said all American citizens must become civic teachers to the up and coming generations. The Campus Progress event concluded with the thought that Kat Barr began with, that regardless of future youth involvement, it must be said that in this election,"young people made the difference."

Obama-Biden campaign leads with early voters

The Obama-Biden campaign today announced a very confident and committed position in the presidential election. With several million volunteers around the country. the Obama-Biden campaign manager, David Plouffe, said “we like what we’re seeing in all the states with the early vote.”

Today the campaign released two 30 second TV ads in Arizona, North Dakota and Georgia. Plouffe said that even though the McCain-Palin campaign has criticized the Obama-Biden campaign about heavy advertising, “the McCain spending levels this week have been quite high. In the Tampa market, they’re spending over 5,000 points of television, which may be the most amount of television ever bought in a political race.”

Through advertising, voter contact, and resources, Plouffe said he feels the Obama-Biden campaign is doing everything they need to do in the swing-states. Plouffe also said the campaign is organizing polling information at popular locations that youths hang out at in the swing states.

Plouffe said that in the tossup state of Nevada, 43% of democrats voting early are new or sporadic. In North Carolina, 19% of democrats voting early never voted in an election before. In Florida, 1/4 of sporadic voting democrats have voted early. Plouffe said the campaign is putting special focus on voters who recently committed to Obama, because they’re known as “sticky” and still vulnerable to vote for McCain. Even though the campaign feels confident in their state of the race, Plouffe said this does not take away from “the fierce urgency of trying to win Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, and Ohio.”

Youth voters are issue voters

The youth vote is expected to play a significant role in this election, and according to Erica Williams of Campus Progress Action, they will vote down the ballot and with unique attention to the issues, especially college affordability.

“Young people are voting, and they are voting in record numbers, because of the issues they care about,” said Williams during a National Education Association conference call.

“We found out that since 2000 the cost of an average public college’s tuition and fees has risen over 58%. The average debt a college graduate faces can sometimes prevent 22% from attending any college at all, and 48% of college qualified high school graduates from attending a four year institution.”

The low youth turnout in previous elections has been partially attributed to difficulties in the registration process. To counter this, organizations like Rock the Vote have been holding massive voter registration drives.

“This year we’ve had over 2.54 million people download a voter registration form from our website...we’re injecting million of young voters into the political process, and if we look back to 2004, 82 of registered young people voted, and we expect to see at least those same rates again,” said Executive Director of Rock the Vote Heather Smith.

The youth vote is expected to play a role in state elections as well. Harris Parnell of the League of Youth Voters pointed to a California ballot initiative that would fund prisons at the expense of the education.

“California voters are going to have to vote on proposition 6, which basically puts more money from the California general fund into the prison system, which is happening at the same time the state has defunded the University of California system, so young voters are making a connection between the educational hardships they’re facing, and the state’s decision to direct resources elsewhere.

Smith says that the importance of the youth vote has been acknowledged by those running. “Candidates are paying attention to them, and you’re seeing everyone from senate candidates on down the ballot to the presidential [candidates], really for the first time in history, reaching out and asking young people for their votes.”

McCain's greatest challenge - the last 18 days

The Brookings Institution hosted the third seminar in a series on "Issues, Ideology, Gender and Race in the 2008 Election" featuring Sunshine Hillygus, Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University; Daron Shaw, Associate Professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin; and Shankar Vedantam, columnist for the Washington Post.

The panelists discussed specific factors pertaining to the 2008 Election such as; campaign tactics, youth involvement, the role of race, gender, ideology, character, and party identification. All three panelists agreed that voters participate in "proximity voting" whereby they determine their own vague ideas on an issue and gravitate towards the candidate that seems the most similar. In this way, they rationalize their own vote choice based on the comfort they feel from their candidate. The youth vote was a large
point of discussion due to the efficiency with which the Obama campaign has used first-time voters and the new millennial generation to his advantage.

The challenge they outlined for Senator McCain, who has fallen behind in recent polls particularly due to the economy, is for him to swing voters who "have a foot in each camp." Those voters, such as pro-life Democrats, have a large decision to make and it will be up to both candidates to convince those voters that the issues that matter to them are the issues each respective candidate can support.