Election has potential to be startling
October 16, 2004
suntimes.com
BY JACK C. DOPPELT
This could be the year young Americans jolt the electorate. They have been disengaged from the political process and from voting in alarming numbers since 1972, when 55 percent of youths ages 18-25 turned out.
Getting young people to vote or pay attention to presidential politics has been different only by degree from getting Americans generally to do so. In our 1999 book, Nonvoters: America's No-Shows, we came to the hard-bitten conclusion that the nonvoting majority (that had dipped to under 50 percent turnout in the 1996 election) is less likely to cross over to vote than it is to become voiceless, invisible and forgotten.
True enough, but not the whole truth. A glimmer lay in the lesson of June 3, 1992, when young Bill Clinton turned the corner in visibility and acceptability by playing Heartbreak Hotel on the saxophone on Arsenio Hall's talk show. That planted the seed for the political process to come to the public through the entertainment part of the common brain. The public could be reached not only as voters or as constituents but as an audience. There would be hope not only for a Ronald Reagan or Bill Bradley to turn their celebrity into political capital, but for a Jesse Ventura or an Arnold Schwarzenegger to catapult into office by virtue of the pop culture buzz. The paradox is that nonvoters could be reached, but not necessarily by anything remotely related to issues, positions, platforms or even the economy stupid. Even image can be shaped and overtaken by the buzz. If you get out the buzz, you can get out the vote, and it's easier with core nonvoters to get out the buzz.
That is why this election has all the potential to be startling, to have young Americans not only voting but making the difference. There are 40 million Americans between 18 and 29 eligible to vote. More than 23 million did not vote in 2000. That was when less than 600 votes made the difference in each of two states (New Mexico and Florida), less than 8,000 votes made the difference in four others (Iowa, Wisconsin, Oregon and New Hampshire), and no more than 220,000 votes made the difference in any of the states that are considered key battleground states this time around. In the key Midwest swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, college students amount to 2 million potential voters.
Young voters are off the radar screen of campaign pollsters. Almost all polls screen for either registered voters or likely voters. Likely voters are some combination of those who say they're likely to vote, have voted before and know where their polling place is. That's not the core, young, traditional nonvoter, who also moves around a lot and uses cell phones that are not part of the random digit dialing system used by pollsters.
The buzz is everywhere, pulsating in caricatured representations on television, radio, film, in music, on the Web, and in sections of the newspaper that appear to have nothing to do with daily campaign news. It is in one sense nonpartisan, in that the political parties and campaign rhetoric are off message.
It is nonetheless powerfully partisan. The buzz assumes certain articles of faith: that George Bush is a prop; that the people around him are dangerous ideologues; that John Kerry and the Democrats are empty and spineless; that the mainstream media are handcuffed by rules of bland detachment, and that the campaign is artificial and outside their attention spectrum.
That is not to say that what happens in the campaign doesn't feed and nourish the buzz. It does. The buzz is Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11"; Jon Stewart's "Daily Show"; Al Franken's Air America; Bill Maher's "Real Time"; the daily stream of concert tours, particularly Punk Voter's Rock Against Bush and the Vote For Change tour associated with Bruce Springsteen, both targeted for battleground states only; Leno, Letterman and other talk shows, and a half dozen movies and documentaries.
The traditionally unplugged, young nonvoter isn't watching the presidential debates, taking in the post-debate spin, or reading the morning paper's coverage. But images from the debates, if they resonate, will not only be seen, but they'll transform into embedded truths, like Howard Dean running amok in Iowa.
We have countless examples of the pop culture buzz getting thousands and hundreds of thousands of young people to zap unexpected life into a reality show or a hot band or even a documentary. If it can happen with "The Apprentice" or Paris Hilton or Michael Moore, it can happen to Election 2004, the year traditionally unplugged nonvoters zap unexpected life into the electorate.
Jack C. Doppelt is the co-author with Ellen Shearer of Nonvoters: America's No Shows, and an associate professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. |
