I squealed with joy last Tuesday when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced his candidacy for president. I immediately ran to my closet shrines to the libertarian gods and paid my respects for offering up such a wonderful candidate for the White House.
Such a racially-conscious, reform-minded candidate deserves some serious support from college students. He’s already been maligned by poor coverage from snarky news outlets such as Vox and Slate, prompting passive-aggressive comments from my various social media accounts.
I immediately thought of ways I could support his candidacy. If my vote alone couldn’t do much, then I needed to rally my peers to the cause. He’ll need all the help he can get in this state after the fiasco at the 2012 Republican state convention.
For those not acquainted with GOP drama, that was the year when leadership strong-armed Ron Paul, favoring delegates out of their spots to the national convention to nominate a presidential candidate. It left a lot of libertarians in Louisiana disillusioned with the Republican Party.
Of course, Rand Paul isn’t the only Republican in need of support. Ted Cruz announced three weeks ago and probably isn’t polling well with college students, much like the lack of success he’ll have with the rest of the nation.
Marco Rubio’s announcement is inevitable, and the U.S. congressman is going to be head-to-head with none other than the third-most popular of the Bush political clan: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Even Democratic shoo-in Hillary Clinton kicked her campaign into gear and announced her presidential bid yesterday, despite having no serious competition on the horizon. Her announced opponents are a conspiracy theorist, the former Savannah State University football coach and joke candidate Vermin Supreme, who takes pictures with a rubber boot on his head and wants to give every citizen a free pony.
Despite the plethora of people looking to seduce the nation, college students probably won’t bother turning out to vote, let alone supporting candidates in other ways.
College students are stereotypically the laziest when it comes to politics, and it’s getting worse. As much as millennials like to sign online petitions about issues and share videos and articles about the latest political screw-ups, they don’t do much substantive political action.
According to a U.S. Census Bureau report on young adult voting in presidential elections, less than half of eligible 18- to 29-year-olds voted in 2012. The number of 18 to 44-year-old voters dropped more than 3.5 million from 2008 to 2012.
College students as a slice of the population are a bit better, voting at rates two times higher than other young adults. In an attempt to ease some of the structural barriers that plague student voting, Student Government passed a resolution to push for allowing Tiger Cards as valid IDs, but there’s no formal legal protections for students trying to vote.
So what’s a politically disaffected Tiger to do? Even if you do vote, you’re part of the smallest age bloc in the nation, so it’s unlikely politicians will pander to your interests. By the time somebody actually gets in office, they’ll have forgotten all the promises they made in their stump speech.
The answer is to get more involved with other people in politics. Studies show that even cursory discussions of politics with others make you more knowledgeable and motivated than those who rely on news media. Maybe you can even convince them to vote for the candidate you support next time around.
Heck, if you’re fanatically supportive, you can donate some of your free time to helping out a candidate’s local campaign. There’s no better way to get some of the most well-connected and influential people in the country to like you and what you stand for than by working for them for free.
It’s really easy to get involved, too. On the Rand Paul 2016 site, for example, you can get all kinds of info about joining the blogger network, supporting him on social media, calling people or even bugging your neighbors about him.
What I’m trying to say is, get off your lazy butt and do something to change the world. You’ll thank me later.
James Richards is a 20-year-old mass communication sophomore from New Orleans. You can reach him on Twitter @JayEllRichy.