"I think people were misled by looking at the percentages of the electorate," continues Patterson, who, like hip-hop impresarios P. Diddy (Citizen Change) and Russell Simmons (Hip-Hop Action Summit Network), was puzzled by the mostly negative press about youth voter turnout.
"Is it a conspiracy?" P. Diddy asks -- "half-jokingly," he says. "That increase should have been applauded, you know what I mean? We got knocked down so much for being irresponsible, for people trying to say that this generation is irresponsible, that this generation doesn't care, that this generation isn't interested in things that are serious. Then, something like this happens -- 4 million or so more votes, like bam! -- and what are folks saying? Young black and Latino kids are voting for the first time, and what are folks saying? I'm not being defensive. I know the truth.
"I'm just calling it as it is."
"I was baffled," says Simmons, who's quick to point out that his 26 hip-hop summits, attended by marquee names such as Kanye West and 50 Cent, to name just two, drew an "estimated 10,000 kids." He goes on: "We made an effort to turn around what had been a trend for young people not to be a part of the process. The fact is, we reversed the trend."
So just what exactly happened?
Explains Patterson, "Some people -- the media in general, the pundits on TV -- have a story line embedded in their minds: That the young people were going to deliver this election to Kerry. Since he didn't win, they reason backwards: Young people must not have turned out in big numbers."
In fact, the youth vote was the only age group the Democratic candidate won -- John Kerry got 54 percent, compared with Bush's 44 percent. (In 2000, Al Gore got 48 percent, Bush 46 percent.) For Kerry, the youth vote was key in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, CIRCLE says. But there's no mistaking that the youth vote was far more divided than some had predicted.
Expectations were high because of the massive get-out-the-vote efforts. MTV's Choose or Lose campaign, for example, had a specific goal in mind: to mobilize 20 million young voters. This year, especially in the past three months, it was impossible to watch MTV -- or MTV2, Spike TV and The N -- without seeing an election-related public service announcement.
"This was an issue-heavy election," says Ian Rowe, who oversaw the Choose or Lose campaign. "The war in Iraq, the war with terror, the increasing price of college education are issues of concern for young people."
However, there's a largely ignored educational divide among young voters, says Patterson of Harvard. Currently, only one-third of 18-to-29-year-olds are in college or have gone to college, and that one-third is more likely to vote. "That's been a consistent voting pattern," he says.
Walk onto any college campus. The stickers! The posters! You can still find a lot of that at George Washington University the hottest campus for political junkies, according to the 2005 Kaplan/Newsweek "How to Get into College" guide.
In the Marvin Center, where the main cafeteria is located, a group of five freshmen -- two Republicans, two Democrats, one too young to vote -- was still chattering about the election as they snacked on Wendy's and Jamba Juice. It's been a frustrating, entertaining, argumentative and long three months. The five, who all live on the Mount Vernon campus, watched the three debates together. "Maybe that wasn't such a good idea," says one. Last Tuesday, about 9 p.m., they ordered three pizzas and watched the election returns. They made it to bed about five hours later.
The Republicans, Blade Smith of Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Amy Hocraffer of Rochester, Minn., went to bed thinking Bush had won; the Democrats, Megan Royden of Columbia and Andre Lindsey of the District, weren't so sure; the 17-year-old, Amanda Beltran, a Democrat from Brooklyn, N.Y., was pulling for Kerry.
For that matter, so was Alama.
