Young Voters: Openminded but Passionate

Want some more insight into the mind of a young voter? Stephanie South offered up her perspective as a young voter in Colorado. Check back for more of her thoughts as a young voter in this election cycle:

When one creates a Facebook profile, we are allowed to tell the world whatever we want them to know about us…as long as the description is one of the options in the dropdown menu. We can update our relationship status and convey which sex we are interested in. We can advertise what we are looking for, whether it be friendship or dating, and we can keep the faith by selecting our religion from a plethora of denominations.

If you are to spend some time profiling my generation on this networking site, you will find we are a diverse group of up-and-coming adults who seem to have one thing in common—we all appear to be a bunch of fence sitters. Instead of choosing a side when it comes to politics, we are labeling ourselves as “Moderate.” To an onlooker, it may seem as though we do not want to be judged by our choice so we refuse to make one. It might also look like we simply do not know or care enough about the subject to make a decision. However, both of these are considerably untrue.

The reason so many of us are staying purple is because it, as opposed to red or blue, most accurately depicts the color we are. Many of us have just spread our wings and are learning how to fly without the help of mom and dad; therefore, our political views are a good mixture of what we were raised on and what we are beginning to figure out for ourselves. The resulting beliefs do not always fall under one or the other. It is not uncommon to find a student well in support of gay marriage but heavily opposed to abortion—two viewpoints from very conflicting sides

We are not fence sitters, but rather we are a generation no longer confined by ideologies. We are refusing to let single terms like “Liberal” and “Conservative” define our political outlook. We are not voting straight ticket. We are demanding more. We want a candidate to look at us for the voters we are and listen to what we have to say, then tell us what they can do about it.

Let us just hope that the next president does not make us promises, then leave us all waiting at the altar.

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Rock the Vote Bio: Rock the Vote was founded in 1990 to organize artists and fight against censorship of musicians. Since then we've evolved to focus on empowering young people to get involved in the political process. We use pop culture, peer-to-peer organizing, and the latest technology to raise visibility of politics and demystify the process of registering to vote. @rockthevote Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 2:44 pm and is filed under young voters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.