Corzine Fails to Inspire Youth
Whether out of hesitance to re-register or just plain apathy, New Jersey youth voters largely ignored yesterday’s election.
By Emily Rutherford
November 4, 2009
“What are you gonna do?” Corzine, seen here on the campaign trail, couldn’t pull it off last night. (AP/Jose F. Moreno)
Up until around 10 p.m. in New Jersey last night, progressives were holding out hope that Obamamentum would work in their favor. Faced with a tough election pitting an unpopular incumbent John Corzine against an almost-as-unpopular conservative challenger Chris Christie, the only thing to bank on was that voters in a left-leaning state like New Jersey would vote for the candidate who has more policies in common with the president that inspired a large youth voter turnout.
As we know now, things didn’t happen that way. Christie beat Corzine by about four points—100,000 votes—and few people who don’t usually care about New Jersey state politics seem to have been persuaded to care this go-round. Young people, who turned out in record numbers to vote for Obama a year ago, made up only 8 percent of the turnout in New Jersey, which was low across the board.
Nevertheless, it’s important to avoid casting this election as a referendum on Obama’s progressive policies or as a sign that young people aren’t interested in the topics Washington is taking up like health care reform or climate change. This was a gubernatorial race, fundamentally focused on state issues like how Corzine has handled the state budget and the state government corruption scandals. There wasn’t a lot at stake to induce, say, a college student from another state to register in New Jersey in order to cast a progressive vote.
Still, Eric Stern, president of the Princeton University College Democrats, had been trying to convince students to register in New Jersey since the beginning of the school year. "What we did was encourage students to vote by mail," Stern says. "We encouraged several hundred students to do that and sent them reminders about voting." Stern says there is no way yet to gauge the success of the College Dems’ campaign, but absentee turnout may have been analogous to in-person turnout at Princeton Borough District 1, an election precinct made up almost entirely of Princeton dorms. The poll workers there reported a slow but steady trickle of young voters throughout the day—maybe one or two students at a time. This is not necessarily a disappointing showing for Princeton, but it’s no comparison to the long lines of Election Day 2008.
When I informally asked my peers here at Princeton, many students said they preferred to vote in their home districts, where they knew more about the candidates. This probably wouldn’t surprise Stern. "I can’t think of anyone who’s more excited about the Corzine race than the Obama race,” he says. “Students get obsessed with images and slogans at the national level, especially on college campuses." Also, progressive students can vote for Obama from any state, thereby avoiding the bureaucratic hurdle of having to change registration.
Of course, Princeton is still an anomaly in New Jersey, and accounts for only about 7,000 of the hundreds of thousands of New Jersey university students. What about progressive youth voters going to college in the same legislative districts in which they’ve always lived? It’s a bit too soon after the election to say why those students didn’t vote, but it seems safe to file their low turnout under "general apathy." Not surprising considering the Democratic candidate was an incumbent, during a recession, without a cohesive vision for how to fix the economy.
As of January, with a socially conservative governor and a legislature with a fairly narrow progressive majority, New Jersey’s state house in Trenton will be a battleground for issues like marriage equality, environmental law, and education funding. The question now is, if the progressive youth vote will turnout next time around. If New Jersey expects to maintain its recently refashioned identity as a progressive state, young progressives have to step into the breach.
Emily Rutherford is a staff writer at Campus Progress and a sophomore at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter.
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All true… and I would add that Corzine kind of fails to inspire anyone. Yeah, he’s a Democrat, but he’s a Goldman-Sachs-alum-plutocrat-Democrat, and his government is laughably corrupt. Not exactly what grassroots dreams are made of.
— CK - Nov 5, 05:50 AM - #