College Students Appear Engaged, Still Very Uninformed

Today I’m providing a special “bonus” edition of the blog because I wanted to share my experiences from journalism class today.  By the way, follow me on Twitter! I actually have two accounts.  @j1mmy_williams is the account I use for sports and other general postings and @right_wing_terp is the account that I use for political posts.  I try my best to keep sports and politics from mixing on that first account, but every so often you will see a political tweet in that account.

Today in my journalism class we shot man on the street interviews with random students pulled off the street.  Each student in the class had to find a person to interview.  We asked them if they were registered voters, who they would be supporting in the presidential election and why they made that choice.  We actually got a fairly equal response in our quick survey, about half of the 20 or so people we found supported Mitt Romney and about half supported Barack Obama, with maybe three or four undecided (And one member of the Green Party, poor soul is wasting her vote).

Two things stunned me about this exercise.  First, I was surprised that the split was actually about even.  I personally expected that being on the University of Maryland campus would mean a massive slew of Obama supporters in our “sample”.  Two, I couldn’t believe how uninformed a vast majority of the people who said they support Obama were!  It was scary how little they knew about the man they want to put back in office.

One student, who identified himself as a graduating criminology major, said he will vote for Barack Obama because “he’s going to keep the student interest rates low,” and “I’m trying to find a job, and it seems like the economy is getting better under Obama.”  First off, Barack Obama had nothing to do with keeping student loan rates low, that job fell to Congress over the summer.  Obama said he would like to see the rates kept low, but ultimately the rates were kept at their present levels by a measure passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress.  The rates were never seriously in jeopardy.

Second, I’m not sure what economy this gentleman was looking at.  Today it was announced that unemployment claims were 382,000 and the forecast called for only 375,000, which still would have been ridiculous.  We also learned that U.S. manufacturing has hit its lowest point in nearly three years!  Obama promised that with his stimulus, unemployment would be in the 5 percent range today.  It’s stuck at 8.1 percent with real unemployment at 15 percent.  If this student votes for Obama and Obama happens to win, I hope he enjoys staring at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom just as much as all the other recent jobless grads do.
 
Another student said he was voting for Obama because he is part of the “47 percent”.  Nice to see that almost overnight we’ve gone from “the 99 percent” to twisting Romney’s words around to say that he hates 47 percent of America.

And another student just totally disgusted me when he came and admitted to all of us there that he was voting for Obama because he's black and Obama is black. I cannot even begin to convey just how utterly disgusted I was by that statement. The only other thing he said was that he wanted to be a part of history.  The "history" was in 2008, buddy.  This is 2012 and Obama is huring America.

To be fair, there were some concerning responses from Romney supporters.  One said he was voting for Romney because his family is Conservative.  It really would have been nice to hear some specifics besides that.  Another indicated he was leaning towards the GOP ticket but couldn’t really back up why, saying he was waiting for more information from Romney first.  However, at least these students weren’t basing their choices off completely false and twisted information like the pro-Obama students were.  The notion that economy has improved is laughable, even at its best.  For sure this was an interesting exercise and while it proved that college kids do pay attention to elections, it also proved that there are still plenty of misinformed college kids out there.

There will be another posting going up tomorrow afternoon, so be sure to check back in then as well!

Jimmy Williams