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Here’s a fact I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere: Ron Paul has come in first among voters under the age of 30 in all three Republican nominating contests this cycle. He won Iowa with 48%, New Hampshire with 46%, and South Carolina with 31%. In 2008, in contrast, he came in third among under 30s in Iowa and New Hampshire, and a weak fifth in South Carolina.
What’s going on here?
Well, mostly he’s just doing better with everybody. Paul’s numbers have always been highest among young voters, and they’ve generally been rising among under-30s more or less in proportion with how they’ve risen in the electorate as a whole.
But even so, the sheer magnitude of Paul’s youth support has got to be a little worrying for the party. Assuming that he’s not going to wind up the nominee — and everybody in the Republican establishment is making that assumption — that’s a lot of young people to bring back into the fold in November. And with Obama putting up huge numbers among under-30s in national polling on the general election, the GOP is going to need every young voter (and campaign worker) it can get.
The most obvious cause for panic in the Ron Paul youth polling, of course, would be a possible third-party run. But while Paul hasn’t unequivocally repudiated that idea, most observers think it’s not going to happen. (Here’s one really big reason why not.) Even with him on the sidelines in the fall, though, some of his young supporters may hesitate to pull the lever for Romney or Gingrich.
And there’s another reason for concern too. In Iowa and New Hampshire, youth support for Paul rose at about the same rate as his share of the overall vote — in Iowa, for instance, he got 2.1 times the votes in 2012 as in 2008, while his youth support was 2.3 times higher this time than last. In South Carolina, though, he tripled his support overall while quadrupling it among the young. If this trend continues and we see an accelerating youth rejection of establishment candidates, that could mean bigger headaches in the general.
Paul took 3% of the Florida vote in 2008, winning 5% of the youth vote. He’s polling at 9% there now, which is pretty much in line with his cycle-to-cycle improvement in the first three states, so assuming he winds up with about that total, we’d expect him to get something like 15% of young voters — and that’s with him largely ignoring the state.
If his Florida youth numbers are a lot higher than fifteen percent we could be seeing the start of something interesting.
January 31 Update | Exit polling has Ron Paul at 9% overall and at 26% among youth voters. That’s a tripling of his 2008 numbers for the whole electorate, and a quintupling of his numbers among youth. At this point I think it’s fair to say that the GOP has a Ron Paul problem with young voters.
It’s been clear for a while — since well before the Occupy Wall Street movement arose this fall — that something new was happening on American campuses. The surge of activism that swept California in the fall of 2009 went national by the spring of 2010, and though there have been peaks and valleys since, a shift in mood, a sense of possibility, has been apparent throughout.
And of course that “something new” was itself part of what created OWS. Students occupied NYU and the New School in 2008, UC and CSU in 2009, and those actions, those occupations, formed a part of the history that the folks who occupied Zuccotti Park drew on last fall. (Student Activism is Back, Micah White declared on the Adbusters blog three years ago, reporting on a wave of occupations in the UK and the US.)
Today’s New York Times picks up the story where it stands now, with a thorough, thoughtful article on the present state of the Occupy movement on American campuses. Occupy, it says, is “turning on its head the widespread characterization of today’s young people as entitled and apathetic,” creating “a giddying sense of possibility” for a new generation of activists.
Sounds about right.
I was recently asked a really interesting request from a Canadian student activist, and I’ve received permission to share it, and my answer, with you all.
His question:
I’ve been looking into starting graduate school in 2013. I found myself naturally drawn to [a private college in New England] but after some basic research I get the feeling that despite their claims of championing social justice & democracy, there does not seem to be a legitimate accredited representative student body on campus. I find myself doubting that I will ever be able to truly enjoy my educational experience at a school that doesn’t have progressive/radical student representation.
So my question to you is: do you have a basic list of some schools in the states that have such representation? I know the Student Union model varies quite intensively between Canada and the USA, but I’m still hoping there may be a few schools out there that have the sort of Union I’m looking for.
My response:
It’s a good question, and not one that has a really straightforward answer. Instead, some general thoughts.
The basic unit of campus representation of students in the US is generally the student government, sometimes called the student association or something similar. (Graduate students and undergrads are typically organized separately.) Student governments range from very weak to fairly strong, with a few general trends visible.
First, and probably most importantly, student governments at public colleges are usually more robust than those at private institutions. Public universities are responsive to political pressure in ways that privates aren’t, and they tend to be more likely to have policies in place ensuring a measure of student autonomy and representation in campus governance. When student activists fought for university reform in the late sixties and after, it was in the public universities that they had the most success, and those successes are still visible on some campuses today.
A second indicator of the strength of student government is the existence of a statewide student association, or SSA. SSAs are most often constituted as federations of student governments within a public university system, and they tend to be established outside the control of the university itself. (In contrast, campus student governments generally exist within the university governance system, and are subject to administrative interference.)
The presence of an SSA in a university system is an indication that the student governments within that system have a history of students’ rights organizing. Many SSAs also foster a culture of student engagement with university governance issues while representing a check on administrative meddling in student affairs. Similarly, campuses that are members of the United States Student Association are generally at least a bit more likely to have activist student governments.
Looking beyond the student government world, some sites of institutionally significant student organizing to keep an eye out for are graduate student employees’ unions, Occupy-affiliated mobilizations, and chapters of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. These groups aren’t directly embedded in university governance like the ones discussed above, but they often represent a pro-student force in campus struggles.
So. That’s what I came up with. I’m eager to hear from y’all on this — I suspect that some of you may have different and better advice than I do.
“‘The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,’ said John P. Feehery, a former Republican leadership aide and executive at the motion picture lobby.”
—Jonathan Weisman, “Support for Internet Bill Wanes as Protests Spread,” The New York Times
“The old media firms in the US aren’t out to get you personally, of course – they don’t really care about you in particular. What they dislike about you is your willingness to share things with your friends, and with the world at large.”
—Clay Shirky, “SOPA and PIPA Would Create a Consumption-Only Internet,” The Guardian
Between weather, the semester break, and administrative suppression, just about all of the campus occupations that were established in the fall have come down in recent weeks.
But the students at Occupy UC Davis put their tents back up last Tuesday, and now Occupy Cal is calling a study-in and encampment at the Berkeley anthropology library for later this afternoon.
More to come, I’m sure…
studentactivism.net 
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