[First published in AM New York.]
A BIG INFLUENCE ON THOSE MEDIA PUNDITS who yelp about John Kerry‘s loss has been Thomas Frank‘s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?
It tells how conservatives have come to win the heartland. It’s a sharp expression of liberals’ perplexity with ordinary people. It’s title also riffs on a much longer-standing, even more exasperated-sounding question – what about the nation’s youth?
“What’s the Matter with Kids Today” has been asked by songwriters from Charles Strauss in “Bye Bye Birdie” (fairly cute) to the punk band NOFX (very sardonic). Professional communicators seem obliged to be perplexed by young people.
Get-out-the~vote efforts among the 18-29 age bracket were gargantuan during the presidential race. Registration drives from MTV and Rock the Vote … the independent youth-led Freedom’sAnswer.Net … to P. Diddy‘s aggressive “Vote or Die” campaign, were impressive for their energy and dedication. But in the end, all that niche-messaging didn’t hit home quite hard enough.
Sure, many more young people did vote – but no more than their elders did, in a climate where the whole populace was vigorously motivated, relative to other recent contests. In a snarky assessment, John Tierney of The New York Times attached the “loser” label to the young voter push on the grounds that “their share of the electorate went from 17% in 2000 to 17% in 2004“.
It’s obviously liberal commentators who would like it to have been bigger.
It is undeniably to young people’s credit (or perhaps not, depending on your viewpoint) that as a bloc they knew just what they wanted. They voted solidly for Kerry – in mirror-image opposition to their immediate elders, the 30-Somethings, who broke decisively for Bush.
(What happens at that watershed age? My generation, when that young, famously did have a numerically specific mantra – “Never trust anyone over 30!“)
The media research community puzzles over how more youngsters could be turned into a significant part of the body politic. But the problem is deeply intractable, according to a Time Warner executive I know who’s done analytical work on behalf of Warner Music, an outfit existentially desperate to know what goes on in young people’s minds. He sums it up: “They don’t vote because politicians don’t talk to them. And politicians don’t talk to them because they don’t vote”.
More is needed than a candidate being a good sport, as Kerry was, on The Daily Show or with Dave Letterman, or telling MTV that he likes Eminem‘s latest. Candidates’ handlers suffer a rush to the head of style-over-substance when they try appealing to youth. Rap and rock count for more than that dreaded word “issues“.
One plaintive voice lingers in my head from 2004’s noisy campaign – that of Stephen Lucas, a high school junior from Leechburg, Pa. who might just know more about the youth vote than all of Kerry’s war-room staff. “I haven’t heard much serious talk about college tuition,” he said.
