Micki Castor was lonely.
The head of the Hillsborough County chapter of the League of Women Voters, Castor and a colleague were staffing a table in a courtyard in front of the Marshall Center on the USF campus last week, looking to register students to vote in next month’s general election.
“Apathy is our biggest opponent,” said Castor (stepmother of U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor) as noon approached. Happy to be able to engage in conversation, she was awaiting classes to end and presumably more students to congregate at Voting Registration Day, designed by voting rights groups nationally to get people registered to vote in this year’s midterms.
Sitting at another table at the event were Ryan Jamison and Brian Many, representing college chapters working to get Charlie Crist elected this fall.
Younger voters are an important part of the 2014 matrix that Democrats are hoping will come to the polls in greater numbers than they did for Alex Sink in 2010. Those 18–to-29-year-olds, along with blacks, Latinos, women and the LGBT community, were the core of a powerful coalition that got Barack Obama re-elected in Florida in 2012, when polls most of the year said that Mitt Romney would take the Sunshine State.
However, as Obama said in a speech trying to rally the troops earlier this year, Democrats have a “congenital defect” — they like voting during presidential years but “we don’t vote” in the midterms, he said.
In 2008, 75 percent of registered Floridians voted in the general election; in 2012, 72 percent. But in the 2010 non-presidential election, only 49 percent of those registered participated — with Republicans turning out in bigger numbers than the Democrats, even though there are more registered Democrats in the state.
The math is pretty simple in this year’s gubernatorial election: If Dems don’t come out in strong enough numbers and vote for Charlie Crist, he’ll face the same fate as Alex Sink. She lost by less than two percentage points in part by not getting the base out in sufficient numbers, allowing four more years for Rick Scott, who for at least half of his first term in office had the worst poll ratings of any governor in the country.
Of course, before voters can be motivated to go to the polls, they have to be eligible to vote.
And that’s why the kids roaming the USF campus on Voter Registration Day are significant in this year’s election.
“You have to shine on a light on them. You have to show them what’s at stake here,” says Ryan Jamison, the 20-year-old founder and president of Students for Crist.
A Navy brat who says he got into political arguments with daycare workers when he was 8 years old, the preternaturally mature Jamison has been working every day on registration events throughout the state. He has people volunteering for him at FSU, UF and FAU, and at the time of our conversation was trying to expand his base to UCF and FIU.
“We have two candidates as far apart on the moral spectrum as possible, and we can’t afford another four years of Scott in office,” he says.
Brian Many, 19, is president of Bulls for Crist on the USF campus. He’s made thousands of calls for the campaign, and has acquired a thick skin in the process.
“I’ve had countless people hang up on me – tell me to go screw myself,” he recounts. “Nobody really cares. People don’t even know who’s running, that there’s even an election going on. It’s definitely a big election, and it’s very sad to see.”
Many acknowledges that a lot of young people who traditionally eschew electoral politics are registering to vote because of the appeal of Amendment Two, the initiative to legalize medical marijuana. But for many of those newbie voters, the enthusiasm starts and stops there.
“People just want to work on that, and they don’t really want to touch on the politicians and things of that nature,” says Alyson Strand, president of the College Democrats at USF. “We like getting people registered to vote, but just now we want to get people to vote in general, whether it’s absentee or voting here… we don’t care if it’s Republican or Democrat, we just want to see those numbers rise.”
The Republicans in the region are also working to get young voters registered, albeit in a slightly different fashion.
“For the younger demographic, door-to-door [canvassing] doesn’t make sense,” says David Cabrera of the Tampa Bay Young Republicans. “What makes more sense is multi-media on all the different platforms — as well as the social aspect of it. “
That includes what Cabrera calls the “narrative of the day,” which is messaged via social media to the Young Republicans, who then message their friends.
But they also continue to work the old-school way, registering Republicans at concerts, state fairs and wherever there’s a congregation of young GOP voters.
Cabrera says one thing that has surprised him this election cycle is that the passion for medical marijuana among some newly registered voters isn’t translating into success at the polls for Crist. Instead, that love appears to be going Libertarian Adrian Wyllie’s way. Wyllie stood at 8 percent in last week’s Quinnipiac poll, the highest a third-party candidate for governor has received in Florida in decades.
Another factor that may be tamping down voter participation among the young and the Democratic this fall is the unrelentingly negative aspect of this year’s campaign, manifested in that same Quinnipiac poll, which shows both Crist and Scott underwater in favorability. Crist’s numbers are 41 percent positive and 49 percent negative, and Scott is at 42 percent positive and 48 percent negative.
“Things have always been negative, but not to the point where there’s back-to-back ads for months on end that seem to cancel each other out,” observes USF Poli-Sci Professor Susan MacManus. “That’s affecting the enthusiasm of what I would call the casual voters.”
MacManus has been teaching and analyzing Florida politics for decades. She says the negative tone of this year’s gubernatorial race is guaranteed to reduce turnout, which won’t help Crist in his efforts to stimulate the Democratic base.
The USF professor thinks the dark tone of the campaign could bring even fewer voters to the polls than in 2010, when Alex Sink was on the ballot.
MacManus was recently named to serve on the advisory board of the Center for Florida Citizenship, a new group backed by Florida TaxWatch that is designed to educate voters and study why more of them aren’t voting.
“How do we turn it around?” she asks rhetorically about the negative edge in all of our elections. With President Obama at his lowest rating ever and Congress in the mid-teens, MacManus says the trend lines are clear. “You plop down three or four years of a negative environment, you plop it into a highly negative governor’s race, and it’s no surprise that you have the hideous turnout we saw in the primary [when just 17.6 percent of the electorate came out to vote]. It’ s very alienating to people. People stop me at the grocery store and say, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho has also been named to that advisory board. He says he’s not worried that his group (which also includes former Tampa Mayor and Florida Governor Bob Martinez and FSU Political Science Professor Carol Weissert) will identify the problems. No, the concern he has is whether any solutions can be implemented, given the hyper-partisan environment in Tallahassee.
“Really, there’s a lot of things that you can do [to increase voting] but the first thing is we have to stop playing partisan politics with our election laws!” he barks. “Because if nothing else, it gives some truth to the argument of some people that it doesn’t matter, [that] they’re rigging the election to win.” Sancho says that, to encourage people to participate, the state needs to pass fair and accessible voting laws for all eligible voters.
Another thing he advocates which might be harder to achieve is an increase in critical thinking skills, so that voters won’t be so easily persuaded by negative ads.
“Negative ads cannot tell you a winning argument,” he says. “They can’t show you much data or build a hypothesis. But they can invoke anger.
“And when I get you mad, you don’t think reasonably, because you’re using another whole new system. And that’s what our political system has dissolved into… Maybe we need to talk about the antidote to that. What kind of antidote is it to a system where we basically spew toxic waste into a communal soup bowl, and expect people to consume it? I think not.”
Early mail ballots began getting sent out this past Tuesday. The last day to register to vote in the November elections is Tuesday, October 6. Early voting begins October 20 in Pinellas County, and October 23 in Hillsborough County.
And Election Day itself is November 4.
This article appears in Oct 2-8, 2014.