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