Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 63

as a staff organizer in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, and who recently wrapped up a stint as a volunteer in Colorado. “It was cool to be an Obama supporter in ‘08, and now it’s cool to have a critique: ‘Well, I think he should do this.’ But they’re still going to vote.” Austin Gilmore, president of the Young Democrats at UNCChapel Hill, pushes back against what he divines as a condescending assumption folded into the expectations of lower youth turnout: that those who supported Obama last time naively embraced him as a political messiah, and have since lost faith in miracles, eschewing politics. “People don’t give young people enough credit,” he says. “Obama didn’t fix every problem that we have in four years, but he did the best he could in terms of dealing with the obstructions of the Republicans in Congress, and the horrible economy he inherited from George W. Bush. A lot of the disappointment comes from people who had unrealistic expectations.” Direct and amiable, Gilmore boils politics down to execution. He puts stock in the Obama machine and takes comfort that it not only remains, but has been upgraded. Local Democratic operatives have told him “money will be very accessible” for a sustained effort at generating turnout, he says. Canvassers possess detailed voting histories of residents laid out across maps, allowing them to focus the “90-percenters” — those most likely to vote. A program called CallFire allows the campaign to run call centers remotely. “We’re all used to technology and we can do it fast,” he says. “If you can just get ten energized students, that beats 50 normal people.” Two weeks earlier, the president had come to UNC, and students stood in line on a drizzly day for hours to see him speak inside Carmichael Arena, the building in which Michael Jordan played college basketball. Three days before he arrived, Gilmore used Twitter to put out a request for 150 volunteers. An hour later, he had more than he needed, he says. “People are pumped about Obama,” he says. Still, random conversations with students on the Chapel Hill campus — an architectural study in warm light filtering through trees onto brick — produce the sense that enthusiasm for the president is at best muted. ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12