STAFF WRITER
JOHN PETERS

The November 2006 midterm elections came and went. At a national level, it resulted in the Democrats controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate. However, many students chose not to exercise their right to vote during the midterm elections for various reasons.

“I chose not to vote this year because I didn’t feel positively enough about any one candidate to merit supporting one,” senior Kate Gardner said.

“People don’t feel like their vote counts,” senior Liz Barone said on why she thought young people like college students don’t vote.

Political Science professor James Bowers said traditionally, not just young people but many people in general don’t vote in midterm elections.

“It drops most of the time to a turn out of 20 to 35 percent, historically,” Bowers said.

He said that the degree in which someone is tied to an area influences whether or not one turns out to vote or not. Homeowners who have lived in Rochester for decades are more likely to vote than a college student who has lived here for three years.

Another degree is someone’s partisanship, or someone’s affiliation with a political party, according to Bowers. The stronger someone is to his/her partisanship, the stronger the turn out of the vote will be as well as the direction of the vote.

Whatever the reason few young people don’t vote, Bowers said it’s not out of laziness.

“There’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in youth voting,” he said. “If you are a group that does not vote, it is less likely that the parties and the candidates will pay attention to those issues that are important to you.”

He added that it’s also more efficient in the campaigning process to target people who will most likely vote rather than people who aren’t likely to vote.  He also said most people get politically active later in life.

“There is a maturing process when it comes to political participation,” he said. “Historically, as people have aged up to a certain point, before illness and things set in, their participation increases. However, there’s always been a larger pool of people who have already somewhat been pre-disposed.”

Education in the home and in secondary education determines political participation in a person’s life Bowers said. Unfortunately, there’s not much emphasis on political involvement in secondary education as Bowers noted.

“I don’t think that the curriculum that is offered in the elementary and particularly the secondary school really fosters, at least in New York state, a commitment to participate in politics,” Bowers said.

For example, New York state regents require two mandatory years of global studies while the participation in government requirement is only a single semester.

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), 2 million more young people voted in the 2006 midterm election than in 2002. According to pollsters, voters under the age of 30 voted in the largest numbers in a congressional election in 20 years.

According to the CNN exit polls, young people voted by a margin of 22 percentage points for Democrats.

Whether they voted or not, students and faculty of different party affiliations felt differently about the national election results.

“I’d normally be disappointed in results like what we’ve seen this election, but given the current state of affairs in the U.S., I can’t rule out the possibility that this change might do some good,” Gardner said.

“I’m so happy; I’m dancing on [the Republican’s] graves,” Professor Linda MacCammon, assistant professor of Religious Studies, said.

Bowers said that one thing is certain about the day after Election Day. “The race for 2008 starts today.”

Email address: jmp6968@sjfc.edu