Last updated: 08/02/08
Switched-on, plugged-in voters

Young voters are supposed to be apathetic when it comes to elections. We don’t care about the issues, and can’t be bothered dragging ourselves down to the polling station. At least, that’s the assumption and despite politicians’ rhetoric about how important it is to get ‘the youth’ involved they tend to reinforce this image. After all, if we aren’t potential electoral kingmakers, then what’s the point in going after our vote?

This has been the conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic for years. Despite a belief that the Iraq War would galvanise American students into action in 2004, the candidate who actively went after younger voters, Democrat Howard Dean, failed to even win his party’s nomination.

Subsequent November general election turnout among the young didn’t leap nearly as high as expected.

Yet all this is changing, and the fact that the 2008 U.S. Presidential election has been dubbed the ‘YouTube election’ by the media gives a fairly significant clue as to why. The internet is an invaluable resource for spreading information, raising money, and, most crucially, mobilising supporters. Since any college student who’s anyone in the U.S. has a Facebook profile, it’s a sure-fire way of reaching young voters.

And, importantly, online support seems to translate into real-life action. Students aren’t just sitting in a darkened dorm room blogging their hearts out; they’re turning out to vote in primaries and caucuses, which select the party presidential candidate, in record numbers. The blog techPresident, which tracks candidates’ use of the web, presents evidence which seems to suggest that internet activity more accurately predicted the Democratic New Hampshire primary result than those vilified pollsters.

Of course, it’s not just students who use the net for political reasons. Candidates are slanting their embrace of technology towards those of us who live our lives online - Democrat Barack Obama, the candidate with the largest number of Facebook supporters, has set up his own social networking site, and both Republicans and Democrats have taken part in debates co-hosted by YouTube, where voters submitted their own questions to the video-hosting site. If Mike Huckabee wins the Republican nomination, it will partly be on the back of a pair of 19-year-old twins, whose site, HucksArmy.com, has been credited with amplifying his nationwide support as well as securing his popular endorsement by Chuck Norris.

But stories about youth involvement in this election are old and tired already. What is far more fascinating is the fact that students are not restricting their online action to declaring their allegiance for a candidate on MySpace and then turning out to vote for them. The internet has been praised (or condemned, depending on how much you care about the average Joe’s view of the world) for its encouragement of ‘citizen journalism’, and now students are taking this a step further. Alexander Heffner, co-founder of Scoop08, one of these projects, said that “there was a void when it came to national, grassroots, student journalism that really could have an impact on issues of importance.” Scoop08 has stepped in to fill that void.

Far more than a blog, it actually gives students a chance to hone their journalistic skills by covering the various campaigns and specific aspects of them perhaps left untouched by mainstream media - the online paper has correspondents responsible for reporting on the activities of the candidates from lesser-known bodies such as the Constitution Party. Scoop08 counts among its influential advisers such wide-ranging luminaries as Robert Kagan, a neoconservative columnist at the Washington Post and Gary Hart, a former Democratic Presidential candidate, signalling that the Washington establishment see this as a serious project. Andrew Mangino, its other co-founder, explains the attraction for students, saying that, “What we lack in age, we can make up for by being very proactive journalists.”

The media are often criticised for focusing far too much on the personalities of candidates, and this too is an area in which American students have taken matters into their own hands. VoteGopher.com, created by a Harvard student, tries to fill in gaps in knowledge young voters might have about the various issues involved in the campaign, and where the particular candidates stand. As the site’s motto states, “We dig, you decide” - even for the most hardened internet political junkie, it’s often difficult to discover what, say, the difference is between the candidates’ healthcare plans. They all agree something needs to be done, but that doesn’t help you choose a candidate if you don’t understand the issue in the first place.”

So it is clear that the internet is having a big impact on how younger voters approach the Presidential election. With its opportunities for intense interactivity, the web allows students to not only get involved, but to focus on the election in their own way.

November, however, is a long way off, and such enthusiasm faces the dangerous possibility of fading rapidly into boredom. Sites such as these must ensure that their lasting legacy is not that they gave a voice to some students in the early days of the 2008 campaign and then stagnated; but that they ushered in a new era of youth involvement in American politics.

by Elizabeth Davies