Author Archive

This post is the tenth in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more.

The youth vote was, of course The Big Story of the 2008 election. But the ink wasn’t dry on the OBAMA WINS headlines when the handwringing began about 2010: would young voters show up again?

Voter turnout always declines in midterm elections, of course. The question of what’s going to happen with the 2008 young-voter crowd is an interesting one — and an important one too. But to understand why it’s important, it’s necessary to debunk a few myths.

MYTH 1: Voter turnout among 18-29 year olds was way up in 2008.

Actually, turnout among young voters rose just two percentage points between 2004 and 2008, going from 49% to 51%. It turns out that 2004 was a really big year for youth voting — from 2000 to 2004, the youth vote went through the roof, but from 2004 to 2008, it stayed pretty stable.

So why is 2008 seen as such a big year for youth voting? Three reasons. First, voter turnout overall actually declined from 2004 to 2008, so even that slight bump in turnout translated into a significantly larger share of the total pie. Second, young people swung sharply to the Democrats in 2008 — 66% of young voters chose Obama in 2008, compared with 54% who picked Kerry in 2004 and just 48% who went for Gore in 2000.

As for the third reason…

MYTH 2: Young voters only show up every four years.

The third reason that the youth vote was perceived as so big in November 2008 was that it actually was really big throughout the spring and summer. Youth participation in primaries and caucuses nearly doubled from 2000 (the last year that both parties had real battles for the nomination) to 2008. As a share of the total primary electorate, young voters jumped from 9% of the whole in 2004 to 13.7% in 2008 — a gain of more than fifty percent. The story of the 2008 youth surge was written long before November, and it demonstrates that under the right circumstances young voters can and will mobilize beyond presidential general elections.

MYTH 3: Youth voters are Obama voters.

Obama did very well among young voters in the 2008 general election, as we’ve seen, but the boost in turnout that year wasn’t purely an Obama phenomenon. Some forty percent of all young voters in the Democratic primaries supported another candidate, for instance. And as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, polling currently shows that youth support for the Democratic Party has been more stable since inauguration day than support for Obama himself.

So … yeah.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with the youth vote this November, and it could prove significant for long-term trends in the American electorate. It’ll also be interesting to see what happens with the spin on the youth vote, though I confess that I think that one is far easier to predict. (Some version of “Young Voters Stay Home” is a cinch to show up as a headline no matter what the turnout numbers say.)

It’s also going to be really interesting to see what happens next week with the DREAM Act and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. If those two reforms pass into law, young liberals will likely wind up more energized for November than they otherwise would have been. If they fail, though, there may well be more of a price to be paid among young voters than among liberals as a group.

This post is the ninth in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

California was the epicenter of last year’s resurgence of American student activism. Ten thousand studends marched at UC campuses on the first day of classes last fall. Students across California took over university buildings well over a dozen times. The March 4 Day of Action, the largest co-ordinated day of campus protest the nation has seen since the sixties, originated in the Golden State.

It’s not surprising that California students rose up the way they did — their state has been hit harder by the current fiscal crisis in higher education than any other, and their state government and public universities have put more of the weight of that crisis on students’ backs than any other. And California students confronted a long list of local crises last year as well, most notably a series of racist incidents that shocked and angered students across the state.

California’s institutions of higher education, confronted with this wave of righteous anger and action, moved forcefully to suppress it. Hundreds of students were arrested on California campuses last year, many of them protesting peacefully. And administrators have imposed harsh campus sanctions as well.

Many students arrested or cited during last year’s demonstrations remain in legal and administrative limbo. Increasingly, faculty and students uninvolved in the demonstrations are questioning the administration’s handling of these events.

How this conflict is resolved has profound implications for student protest in California and throughout the United States, and it’s going to be one of the biggest student activism stories on this blog and beyond in the coming year.

The DREAM Act, number five on the StudentActivism.net list of the top twelve activism stories to watch this year, will come to a vote in the US Senate in the next few days, and organizing to secure its passage is reaching a fever pitch. In a story on the upcoming showdown this morning, The New York Times said that next week’s vote “gives the student movement a chance to show its muscle.”

Supporters of the law, which would give undocumented young people brought to the US as children a path to citizenship through college enrollment or military service, have been lighting up the phones on Capitol Hill ever since Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that he would move to pass it as an amendment to the Defense Department’s budget.

Republicans who have supported the DREAM Act in the past are backing away from the bill now, fearing the boost that passage could give the Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, and the Senate’s filibuster rules make passage an uphill battle.

But with the Republican Party expected to make significant gains in the Senate this November, the DREAM Act’s chances are unlikely to improve anytime soon, so activists across the country are throwing themselves into the cause with passion — supporters of the bill say that they made more than ten thousand calls to Senators yesterday, and they’re aiming to hit fifteen thousand today.

You can follow the DREAM Act movement as it builds toward next week’s vote by checking out the #DREAMact hashtag.

Christine O’Donnell, the newly minted Republican candidate for the US Senate from Delaware, has spent her entire adult life offering wacky soundbites to the nation’s media. First to break were her anti-masturbation comments — she believes, among other things, that if a man knows how to masturbate, he won’t be interested in sex — but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yesterday the internets were all abuzz with her contention that she hates lying so much that she’d have told Hitler where the Jews were hiding. And now we have this nugget, from a 2003 Washington Times article on the rise of co-ed facilities in American college dorms:

“What’s next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?”

Reached for comment yesterday, by the way, O’Donnell refused to say whether she still opposes masturbation. “My opponents dug up a quote I gave 16 years ago,” she said. “I was a pundit. I was very passionate in my 20s and wanted to share my beliefs.”

Indeed.

According to reports on Facebook and an activist blog, activists from AFSCME local 3299, a statewide local representing University of California employees, will be leading an attempt to shut down today’s meeting of the UC Regents.

Protest organizers say the Regents will be voting today “to vote to force paycuts up to 5% on all [UC] employees … so UC executives can keep their lavish retirement benefits,” and they plan to block that vote by mass action.

The Regents have been meeting since Tuesday on the campus of UC San Francisco Mission Bay. The meeting is scheduled to resume sometime this morning, and protest buses are scheduled to leave Berkeley at 6:45 (that’s about ten minutes from now).

UC Student Regent Jesse Cheng has been liveblogging the meeting all week, and his site will most likely have news on the protest as it unfolds today.

Update | Here’s some background on today’s vote, from the Fresno Bee. AFSCME is quoted in the article as predicting that proposed changes would reduce pensions of UC’s lowest-paid employees by as much as 36%.

7:00 am California time | Multiple reports say that activists will attempt to citizens’ arrest UC President Mark Yudof at today’s meeting. Also, there’s apparently going to be a big puppet.

7:05 am | It’s important to point out that only two UC campuses — Berkeley and Merced — are in session right now. The system’s other eight schools start classes later this month. (On September 24 2009, many of you will recall, UC students started off their school year with a bang, staging a ten-thousand-student walkout across the system in response to massive fee hikes and the defunding of the university.)

8:00 am | An official UC account just tweeted that today’s Regents meeting is scheduled to begin in half an hour, with a live audio stream going online at 8:59.

9:15 am | One Twitter report from a bystander says that “loud protests” are causing “chaos” on the UCSF campus.

9:25 am | The start time of the livestream has been pushed off multiple times, with no explanation.

9:50 am | Livestreaming is finally up, and public comment is underway.

10:10 am | UC Student Regent Jesse Cheng has started his day’s liveblogging, and says that the public comment period was delayed because of an extended closed session. He reports that a lot of union members are in the building for the public comment period, but doesn’t mention any disruption.

Seems really strange to me that a statewide union local would make an empty threat to shut down a Regents meeting, but it appears that may be what happened this morning. Weird.

10:15 am | I spoke too soon, and my instincts were right. There’s an action inside the meeting going on now — it began at the end of the public comment period.

10:20 am | UC police have cleared the room.

1:15 pm | The meeting continued as scheduled after the disruption, and there appear to have been no arrests.

Friday | The Daily Californian has a rundown of yesterday’s events.