October started with a beautiful string of days here in Madison, continued with a dominating performance against Ohio State, and is coming to a close in the final stages of an election cycle that is captivating the national spotlight, largely because of pundits. A trend that these pundits seem to continually return to in every article this year is the ""sweeping mandate"" that the Republican leadership is sending into office. These people seem to be fond of waving around their poll numbers that prove, so they claim, that this election will land them in office. These polls are an archaic, outdated method of data gathering and analysis; their predictions of success are based on the conformity of our free will to their computer-generated models.
One glaring example of how much these polls fail in today's society is that they do not include people who have no land line and only use a cell phone. I can think of a few thousand people right here in Madison who are not being counted by these polls.
That's right. You. Campus. The pollsters feel safe blithely ignoring the huge numbers of students on our historic campus, and on campuses across the country. Their reasoning is simple—students don't care. Students don't vote. They think that this year we're going to stay on the sidelines and watch as the decisions that shape our country and our future are made by another, older generation. They say it's happened every other year, why not this year? Here's an unsurprising fact: That attitude is exactly what undermines students' power to make a difference. Students have been told repeatedly that we can't make a difference, and for some inexplicable reason we have believed this in the past.
This continuing trend of student-voter apathy is baffling to me. This year, a common response heard across campus when asked, ""Are you planning to vote?"" is that these elections ""don't actually affect me."" But student issues are at stake every year, and in past years students have failed to advocate successfully for their own interests. This year, that needs to change. This year presents a unique combination of our interests on one ballot: a medicinal marijuana referendum, a college funding referendum, a governor's race featuring candidates with starkly differing views on birth control and a U.S. Senate race with the potential to send a man to Washington, D.C., with economic policies that would plunge our post-graduation economy back into the ditch.
So, as you slog through midterms, papers and sleepless nights of studying, please keep something in mind: Nov. 2 is almost here. We're within two weeks of Election Day, and that means that now is OUR time. It's our time to motivate, our time to shape the future. Who decides? We decide!
—Jordan Weibel
publicity chair
College Democrats of Madison
