Why Don't Students Vote?
About the project
I grew up in the south. My parents and grandparents always referred to Atlanta as a blue bubble within a crazed red state. To them, Ronald Reagan was the spawn of Satan and Jimmy Carter might as well have been kin. In the comfortable borough of Atlanta, that's the norm. Travel 45 minutes outside our neighborhood in the city in any direction, though, and you’ll feel like you’ve entered a different country. We don't know anyone who lives in Augusta or Macon or Norcross. And they don't know us. In some ways, I've always seen this detachment as symbolic. What I’ve come to believe about our broken politics, through 2016 and 2018, through my own experiences and the ones I've studied, through the vitriol of our daily existence, through the evolution of my political obsession, is a simple and uncomfortable reality of this country: We don’t understand each other.
The three richest people in the United States own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent. The richest 0.1 percent in the US make 196 times more than the bottom 90 percent. The average college graduate with a bachelor’s degree makes just over $61,000,000 per year; those who graduate with a GED make just over $37,000,000 on average. More than 10 percent of the country lives in poverty. Far more struggle every day to make ends meet.
It stands to reason, in this time of burgeoning wealth inequality in the richest nation in the world, that our politics are as divisive and rage-inducing as ever. Sixty-four percent of Americans are currently dissatisfied with the federal government. Education level has become the single biggest predictor of support in American politics. We elected an authoritarian xenophobe without political experience as President. We are reaching a breaking point.
And the only way out is to listen. So in this project I wanted, above all, to think and to listen. I’m genuinely interested in finding out whether my generation cares. Youth participation in politics has remained staggeringly low for decades. I wanted to use this project as a vessel for evaluating why that might be, through conversations, surveys, and research. Where do we fit into this picture?
I will graduate from Michigan with a degree in Political Science and minors in History of Law and Policy and Writing. This was a passion project, plain and simple, merging my love of writing and fascination with broader trends of American Politics. On campus, I spent much of his time working for The Michigan Daily, where I covered the football team and served as the Managing Sports Editor for the 2019 calendar year. I'm originally from Atlanta, Ga., where I'm a 6th generation native of the city on my mom's side. I hope you, the reader, will come away with one realization about student voting: our generation, like yours and all those before it, is not a monolith. We are complicated. We are all different. And sometimes the answers aren't easy.