50 Reasons The GOP Will Never Have The Young Adult Vote (VIDEO)

Is what the media keeps telling us about young voters really true? A July 2013 poll from USA Today finds that — surprise! — young people feel ‘put off’ by politics and find them to be boring and irrelevant. Equally-represented Republican and Democratic pollsters took this nationwide poll of 1,071 adults via telephone/cell phone. Susan Page reports:

Americans by more than 2-1 say the best way to make positive changes in society is through volunteer organizations and charities, not by being active in government. Those younger than 30 are particularly put off by politics. They are significantly less likely than their parents to say participating in politics is an important value in their lives.

When asked whether they would consider running for political office, the majority of poll respondents declined.

The top reason cited by those 30 and older is that they decided running for office would be too time-consuming. The top reason among those younger than 30 is that politics is vicious and nasty.

Page, a 19-year-old student from Lebanon, OH was all excited about his internship for the dysfunctional Republican-dominated Ohio State Legislature … until his negative experience “convinced him he didn’t want a career in government or politics.” He’s now changing majors from political science to non-profit management.

I thought I wanted to be one of them. But it was more that politics was a game they wanted to play, and it wasn’t about the constituents.

There’s just one problem: Millennials actually do care about politics very much, and student activism is alive and well. Just ask the kids from San Jose State University, who got the nation’s 10th-largest city to vote for a $10 minimum wage; or the students and young professionals occupying Florida Governor Rick Scott’s office to demand that the state’s notorious “Stand Your Ground” law be repealed.

It never seems to occur to us that maybe this myth of young people and their supposed disengagement from politics is exactly what the GOP wants us to believe. After all, conservatives have spent the past 40 years obstructing and maligning government, enacting tax policies that deprive government of the income it needs to operate, and convincing us that our government is broken and doesn’t work. One wonders, if participating in politics is so futile then why are Republicans working so hard to keep us from doing it? Are they worried that if we actually get involved, we might actually start fixing things?

Despite the USA Today article’s pessimistically sighing title “Poll: Public service valued; politics ? not so much” and the first few hand-wringing paragraphs, things aren’t as bad as Page’s publisher might want us to think. The article presents ample evidence that not all of us feel so negatively about politics and Washington. After all, a small but significant 14 percent of poll respondents did say they would consider running for political office. Meanwhile, 31-year-old liberal arts graduate Beth Dopkeen found herself working for the Pentagon, of all places. She loves her job and feels her work makes a positive impact on society:

Every day I get to do analysis and put it in front of decision-makers and help them make the right decision on really important stuff. At the end of every day, or at least at the end of every week, I feel I made a change.

Maybe pollsters are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking whether we feel positive or negative about government, a more useful starting point would be to ask what we want from government. That might provide clues on how we feel it’s failing us. Unfortunately, that might reveal that many, if not a majority, of Americans actually want government to do more. In “A Young People’s Politics,” a young filmmaker who goes by the YouTube handle FreshPresh505 went around what appears to be her college campus during the 2012 elections, and asked her cohorts for their opinions on the state of America and its politics. These students and graduate students represented diverse economic statuses and ethnicities, and even their ages appear to span at least a decade. Fifty very interesting and compelling topics emerged.

Here’s the video:

50 Things Millennials Have to Say About Politics in the FreshPresh505’s “A Young People’s Politics”

1. America today? No hope.
2. It’s quite scary. I’m not really happy with America right now. I’m concerned about America.
3. Corrupt, hypocritical, lies.
4. I believe that America pretty much blows.
5. We’re not all equal. I think it’s a big hoax.

6. You put out this whole thing, like freedom, religion is separated from the state, and blah blah blah, and it’s all really … not there.
7. Basically, America right now is completely off-balance. There’s no direction. Everything’s a little — excuse my language — f-cked up.
8. America is still a great country, yet we still don’t have our priorities straight.
9. The thing I’m thinking about right now is how there’s no longer any adherence to facts or truth.
10. I think there’s a lot of pressure on the middle class to perform, and I don’t think there’s a lot of jobs out there. Financially, we’re in really bad shape.

11. Basically, we’re being run by rich people.
12. Our system is falling apart … and the one percent gives you the crumbs.
13. Nobody’s really paying attention to the working class … We should really focus on the 99% and what the 1% is doing.
14. We don’t want to be lied to, we don’t want to be f-cked with, we’re tired of it.
15. Growing up, I see companies destroying our environment, everything I love and care about, I see the government taking it down.
16. We tend to argue more than actually put ourselves into action.
17. The main thing that’s tearing our country apart is that nobody can agree on anything.
18. [on swearing on the Bible] How about if you don’t believe in the Bible? How about if you believe in the Koran, or you’re a Buddhist or something? What does that even mean?
19. Our nation is centralizing our military … and they’re trying to make us seem stronger to other nations, while actually, we’re very weak. There’s a lack of unity. Most of our taxes go to the military. If we put at least a good percentage into our public systems, it’d be a lot better.
20. Everything is owned, every person in the government is owned, I don’t feel like we have any choice in any of the things that are going on. It’s almost hopeless to even try to change what people are controlling over us.

21. The government is a separate group of people, they’re not part of the people.
22. There’s a wave of conservatism right now — in Texas, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia — these really strong anti-immigrant laws. At one point, Germany went to that.
23. I think immigration reform is very important, because I’ve seen families being separated. Little kids being separated from their moms and dads.
24. We speak about the importance of education, but when it comes to actually making decisions that actually benefit our youth and our future, we tend to put that aside.
25. People who come to our schools are people who want to enlist people in the military, and they say ‘this is your only option and alternatives are hard to do.’
26. We’ve already had lots and lots of budget cuts, our schools are overcrowded, they don’t have the resources.
27. The lack of education, there’s no focus on it … they don’t fund it as much as they should.
28. Standards are low. They don’t want to go to college, they just want to graduate.
29. Education is one of those issues that we always like to consider, but never want to actually do something about.
30. The pop culture influences so much, they don’t even consider the purpose of education any more. Education is the only thing we have to lead us, to guide us. Now that they don’t value it, it doesn’t matter how we teach the old people, if the younger people aren’t there to fulfill that path … at least here in America.

31. There’s gonna be the rich, the extremely rich, but there’s no such thing as middle class. The middle class is gonna be wiped out. There’s just poor, rich.
32. There used to be [television] channels focused on preservation of wildlife, and are now doing the complete opposite. Like the Discovery Channel at one point was about preservation of nature, and is now hosting shows about guns, about crocodile hunting.
33. There’s a lot of ignorance because of the media.
34. You can be a pop star and write some sh*t about ass-ass-ass-ass-ass 10 times in a row. That’s how our economy works, because there’s us — who work really hard — and [the pop star] is living in Cyprus, rapping about nothing, and he has fans, and followers.
35. This is sort of a corporate democracy. Ignorance and doubt are the most powerful tools that the corporations have at their disposal. […] Being kept blinded by corporate industry is, I think, the most dangerous affliction of this country.
36. The famous, rich, and powerful dumb-asses in this country have a following — even dumber, poorer followers — it’s all a big psycho-f-ck.
37. The real problem now is just ignorance.
38. The more people you have and the more advertisement you give out for the more status-quo life-style, everyone will be along with it.
39. What you can afford, what car you drive, people have lost touch with the organic way of life. The most important thing is the planet.
40. The basic issue is, we’ve gotta get people’s attention.

41. A standpoint could be informing ‘the masses’ of what else could exist in this country.
42. There’s always gonna be some sort of corruption in America, you know.
43. People are not involved.
44. The right for gay people to marry. I think that’s something, again, that could be changed tomorrow.
45. We’re gonna be at that stage where we’re gonna not progress.
46. We’re gonna be like in the 1800s, where women don’t have the right to do what they want with their bodies.
47. I think this [2012] is a really important election, because of the Supreme Court […] whether or not abortion will be legal any more in this country and how money is going to continue to rule this government.
48. For all we know, our votes don’t count.
49. No matter what, it’s going to be the same.
50. If you don’t vote, then you don’t have an opportunity to complain.

Edited by WP.