An Election To Remember
Seton Hall > News & Events Friday, August 15, 2008
by: Pegeen Hopkins
As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the election of 1948, President Truman took his campaign messages straight to the people, convinced that if he did, he would prevail come Election Day. On his now famous whistle-stop campaign tour, Truman traveled 22,000 miles by train to connect directly with voters. His strategy paid off.
In the current election, the ways candidates reach out to voters are often related to new media -- social networking, video and photo sharing sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and YouTube -- but the aim remains the same. For younger voters, these digital vehicles prove to be particularly potent. According to a poll conducted late last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, people under 30 are almost twice as likely to mention the Internet as newspapers as the source for most of their news about the election.
To learn more about the intricacies of Election 2008, this spring Seton Hall magazine turned to Joseph Marbach, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who is a professor of political science and a regular commentator on politics for the media.
The media has focused on increased voter turnout in this election. How do you see it? All the numbers have indicated large turnouts throughout the country. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama has attracted many younger voters as well as more affluent middle-class people who would normally have registered in primaries as Independents -- and they all came out to vote in the Democratic contest. There's also John McCain, who has a track record of appealing to Independents. This contributed to the turnout in early contests.
Will increased voter turnout translate into higher numbers of voters in the fall? That's the trend; fewer voters turn out in the primary and then it increases in the general election. But polls indicated that a significant number of Democrats said, “If it's not Obama, I'm not going to vote or I might vote for McCain.”
Others said, “If it's not Clinton, I either might stay home or vote for McCain.” That's something we can't predict.
Has the fact that Michigan and Florida scheduled primaries earlier in the year had a positive or negative effect on the election process? Voters in Michigan and Florida were victims of the Democratic Party's rules, which were designed to maintain the integrity of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary being scheduled first. This became a real problem for the Democrats, particularly in Florida, where a Republican legislature voted to move up the primary, and the Democrats in that state were denied a voice in the selection process.
Also on the Democrats' side, rules regarding the proportional allocation of delegates promoted the emergence of two candidates who continued to run. On the Republicans' side, this was not the case; McCain became the nominee, but he didn't win many states outright. He won Florida, for example, with about 35 percent of the vote, and because of the “winner take all” rule, he won all Florida's Republican delegates. If the Democrats were to use that same process, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee.
By winning all the big states, she would have had all those delegates. But because of the proportional representation, if a candidate wins a multi-candidate election with 30 percent of the votes, the candidate gets 30 percent of the delegates.
What has interested you about this election? The role of the Internet, YouTube and programming on late night or cable television. All the candidates have appeared with Letterman, Leno and Jon Stewart -- even on Saturday Night Live. We've seen a blurring of the lines between politics and entertainment.
I've also been impressed with Obama's political communication skills. His communication strategy is cutting edge when compared with the other candidates', whose campaigns have been mired in the 1990s mode of delivering a message. His is much more interactive and he has been able to raise much more money because of that.
Is there a general sense of a greater political engagement among young people in the political process? There is. We are fortunate here at Seton Hall. We have a politically active student population and we have had one since 9/11.
The fact that we have had a voting booth located on campus since the 2004 election is a testament to the awareness of the student body and to students' willingness to change their registrations from home to campus so they can participate in the election. We now bring residents from the Village of South Orange to campus to vote and that never happened before.
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