Like I Was Saying...
Right now, I'm obsessed with the mid-terms.
God, I love politics. I love elections and love scouring through early returns. I love scrolling through the news.
I found this one guy on Twitter that's breaking down the early voting numbers every day here in Texas. It's just fun to watch the ebb and flow of it all. (Yes, I'm back on Twitter)
I forget how we followed elections before Twitter and the twenty-four news cycle. The newspaper? We had to wait that long.
Today I want to talk about something that's come up a couple of times: the youth vote.
Oy! The Youth Vote.
Look, I've been following politics since I was a kid. Politics was a common topic at my house. My parents were precinct chairs for the Republican Party in our neighborhood.
So I grew up around it.
I turned eighteen in '95, so my first major election would've been the '96 election when Clinton beat Dole. I would've been a sophomore in college when the election rolled around. I want to say I was registered, but I'm not too sure. Maybe I did when I got my Driver's License when I was eighteen. But, again, I'm not sure.
In the fall of my sophomore year, I was knee-deep in college life in the Panhandle of Texas. Maybe there was some talk about the election, but it didn't pique my interest.
My theory is that I was in this self-absorbed bubble, that really, I didn't care what much of the world was doing at the time.
It wasn't till I left that bubble that I became keenly aware that there was life outside that bubble and who was running things effected me.
My first vote came to re-elect Bush in 1998 for the Governor of Texas. I was a big fan of George H.W. Bush since he'd been Regan's VP and he was a Republican. I'd always aligned more with Republicans anyways.
I want to say it was in the run-up to the 2012 election that Republicans went after the Youth vote. I seem to remember them making a big deal of trying to reach out to the youth to beat Barrack Obama.
The talk back then from the Republican Party was that the youth vote was going storm the polls to deliver Romney the presidency, and guess what?
They didn't show up. Instead, they averaged out as they usually do. Not that Romney had any hope of beating Obama. If nothing else, Obama was a brilliant campaigner and had the backing of the Mainstream Media.
I want to say Republicans learned their lesson after that election. It's like the conventional thinking was if the youth show up fine, but we're not going to bank on 'em to vote.
The Democrats seem to have never learned that lesson. It didn't help them in 2016, and it did increase some in 2020, but it still wasn't anything to write home about. 2020 is screwed because of COVID.
The thing is, in our current Governor's race, O'Rourke has banked a lot in the youth vote by doing a barnstorming tour of a whole bunch of college campuses. Good for him.
But I did see one picture taken by a frustrated O'Rourke reporter showing this long line to take a picture of him, but juxtaposing it was a picture of the empty voting line.
And that about sums it up for the youth vote.
If I ever were to run for public office, God love the youth, but I'm not sure I'd count on them to win me an election because I was where they were a long time ago and was putting off adulting as long as I could.