By Terri Schwartz
Barack Obama’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election will undoubtedly be known as one of the most important triumphs of our nation as a whole. His presidency will be a vital step away from the racist history of our country, being the nation’s first African-American president. Regardless of how his presidency goes, this is a momentous accomplishment for our country. And Obama won with a landslide electoral college victory to boot.
Bostonians took to the streets Tuesday night after news anchors announced the victory, an event typically reserved for when the Red Sox win the World Series or the Patriots win the Super Bowl. Never before has any president so inspired our generation to get out there and vote.
Obama is especially popular with the college-age demographic,a group of people who have been known to not cast their votes in previous presidential elections. This year, his election became a cause. In past years, MTV and P. Diddy made it their cause to try to motivate the younger generations to contribute their ballot. But this year it became a viral phenomenon.
Facebook has become one of the most popular networking sites for college-aged students, and the creators of Facebook used that power responsibly. Over the past month, free “gifts” have been made available in the form of Obama and McCain campaign buttons, among other things.
Members were allowed to “donate their statuses” to expand the cause for both candidates, and the automatically updated statuses would issue new reminders daily for all of that users’ friends to see that the countdown to the election was winding to a close.
On Nov. 4, Facebook went all-out for the election. It had a tracking link for Facebook users to click on after they had cast their vote (that might have been the first thing I went to once I got on a computer after voting), as well as plenty of blurbs all over the website with the basic idea of “we don’t care who you vote for, just vote.”
It seemed to work. The number of Facebook users who had voted steadily climbed over the course of the day, and the motivation from such a public and popular social networking website surely got a few college voters to the booths.
But it wasn’t only Facebook that was trying to get young adults out to vote. A fan site for the bestseller Vampire novel Twilight, called “Novel Novice Twilight,” created a voting campaign to educate Twilight readers about getting out and casting their ballots. The Twilight fan community, typically stereotyped as thousands of screaming 14-year-old girls with their moms, is not a group most would associate with voting education.
Google even modified its logo to look like voters going to the booths to cast their ballot.
According to Forbes, a deciding factor in this years’ election was the college demographic. MSNBC reported an estimated 22 to 24 million young voters turned out for this election, an increase in under-25 turnout by at least 2.2 million from 2004. Everyone, it seems, did their parts to get us out to the booths.
Groups that are not typically associated with politics did their part to pass along education and try to get their subscribers to care about the election. Twilight did it by comparing the Obama/McCain election to the book’s famous feud between lead male characters Jacob and Edward. Facebook did it by forcing the election down your throat on their home page.
Well, I guess it worked. For the first time in my life, I was able to help decide who became president of the United States. It wasn’t an unchangeable aspect of my life that I could blame on my parents, but rather something that I had the capability to decide. And my vote counted.
That is something to party over.
-Terri Schwartz can be reached at [email protected].
