Where is the Youth Vote Going?

With Election Day just a little over a month away, partisan bickering is at an all-time high, along with unemployment, inflation, class warfare and our unsustainable debt. Just four years ago, Obama won the race for the White House with a great deal of help from the youth. College students came out in full swing on college campuses all across the country for Obama as they thought he would reduce the debt and bring our troops home.

Fast forward to 2012 and the energy from “Hope and Change” has faded away as young people have become apathetic to both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

The mainstream media is scrambling to find young people who voted for Obama in 2008 that are now voting for Romney and 2012 and it is a difficult task as young people are apathetic to both candidates. Romney hardly had a great deal of youth support to begin with but still had the opportunity of welcoming the Paul crowd to the GOP which included a large percentage of the youth vote but completely blew his chances with his treatment of the grassroots at the RNC. But where are the young people who are not entirely political up until election time? They are looking towards libertarianism.

Many conservatives say that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Obama, yet they don’t stop to think that it is Gary Johnson in fact, who may be stealing votes from Obama. Young people are sick of the endless wars, unsustainable debt, spiraling interest rates on student loans and a failing dollar. The youth also don’t want the government meddling in the affairs of individuals social lives either. This is an excellent opportunity for the GOP to change its messaging. This is not to say that the GOP should change its principles, but the way we portray our message and our party.

This is what the left has going for them, the media has helped them display Republicans as gay hating, racist, rich loving old white people, even though this is not the case. If we promoted, perhaps, “individual liberty” instead of making gay marriage a national issue, we could attract many young people to the party. Same with the immigration, Democrats own this issue. If we showed how immigrants have come here for economic freedom instead of government programs we would win a lot of youth voters. Now, all we talk about is how much they cost us in taxes and how we should deport them. This is not how we win the youth vote today, if Romney and the rest of the GOP are serious about winning in November, the GOP needs to take a step back on the trigger happy war front and start promoting individual liberty and economic freedom. This would certainly attract a great amount of youth voters who are currently disenfranchised from the system.