American Forum

AMERICAN FORUM
By STEFANIE DAZIO
With less than a month to go before the Nov. 2 midterm elections, the youth vote is still up for grabs, panelists said at Wednesday’s American Forum in the Katzen Arts Center.
“Young voters are most likely to make up their minds on Election Day,” said panelist Karen Finney, an MSNBC political analyst and former communications director for the Democratic National Committee.
Panelist Kevin Madden – a public relations executive, Republican strategist and former press secretary to Gov. Mitt Romney's campaign and House minority leader John Boehner – said Republicans courted the youth vote well in 2004, with what he called “version 1.0.”
But then-candidate Barack Obama took it to “version 7.0” in the 2008 presidential election, he added.
The American Forum is an hour-long, multi-media town hall event that “seeks to connect and engage young people with national and international media issues,” according to its website. It is sponsored by the School of Communication and WAMU and first debuted in 1986.
AU School of Communication Professor Jane Hall moderated this year’s event; themed “is your vote up for grabs?”
While Finney and Madden debated Obama, the youth vote, Congress and the Tea Party, audience members contributed their thoughts via Twitter – a screen featuring the live feed joined the panelists onstage.
Sondra Campanelli, 18, of New York said she found the Twitter screen “distracting” as an audience member, and felt that it would have been more effective for people to go up to microphones and pose their questions out loud, rather than tweeting them.
But the American Forum isn’t the only thing using a Twitter-style town hall – MTV announced Tuesday that Obama would appear in a similar event Oct. 14 in a push to re-engage the fan base that helped propel him to the White House in 2008 for congressional Democrats.
Madden cited the recent success of the Tea Party as a “mood” that channels Independent voter anxiety and anger at the deficit, spending and overall Washington disconnect into a move toward the right end of the political spectrum.
Hall’s last question to the panelists took this shift to the right into account and asked them to predict the percentage of youth voters that would be Republican in the 2022 election. In the 2008 presidential election, 66 percent of the 18-29 year old demographic voted for Obama, according to the New York Times.
Madden started with 30 percent, but upped his guess to 45 percent.
“Well most people that are voting now will probably be Democrats, because if you vote three times in the same direction, you tend to continue to vote that way,” Finney said. “So I’d have to say about 60” percent.
Campanelli said she was surprised that the estimates were so high, but said that because she’s lived in very liberal areas, that may have influenced her.
But then again, she said, in 2022 it may not be the same Republican party as it is now.