Obama encourages Ohio college students to vote

JOHN SEEWER,THOMAS J. SHEERAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

BOWLING GREEN — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s lat­est trip to Ohio wasn’t just about get­ting his mes­sage across. He wanted to make sure col­lege stu­dents and 20-somethings are going to vote in big num­bers, just like four years ago when they backed him by a wide margin.

Stu­dents skipped classes and stood in a long line through inter­mit­tent rain out­side the bas­ket­ball arena at Bowl­ing Green State Uni­ver­sity on Wednes­day where Obama told them to reg­is­ter to vote.

“No excuses,” he said before head­ing to Kent State Uni­ver­sity for another rally.

At Kent State, Obama had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and made a pitch for young peo­ple to reg­is­ter to vote.

Jor­dan Berry, 21, a junior edu­ca­tion major at Kent State who waited for the pres­i­den­tial motor­cade hold­ing a green-and-white pro-Obama sign dis­trib­uted by the president’s pub­lic employee union back­ers, isn’t sure young vot­ers are that interested.

“Apa­thy — quite a bit of my friends are not going to vote because they don’t like the job the president’s done, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily agree with the path Rom­ney would take, so they just decided they’re not going to vote,” he said.

A big part of Obama’s strat­egy in Ohio and other key swing states is reach­ing out col­lege stu­dents who are con­cerned about the ris­ing costs of edu­ca­tion, job oppor­tu­ni­ties and pay­ing off stu­dent loans.

Obama kicked off his re-election cam­paign with a rally in May at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity. In recent months, he’s been at Cap­i­tal Uni­ver­sity in Colum­bus and Cuya­hoga Com­mu­nity Col­lege in Cleveland.

His cam­pus tour across north­ern Ohio on Wednes­day gen­er­ated a buzz at Bowl­ing Green.

“It’s def­i­nitely rais­ing aware­ness,” said Becca Schroeder, a fresh­man from Ottawa. “Peo­ple my age need a rea­son to vote oth­er­wise they’ll be too lazy and let it pass by.”

The president’s trip back to Ohio comes as the Repub­li­can ticket wraps up a three-day bus tour of the state. GOP chal­lenger Mitt Rom­ney cam­paigned in sub­ur­ban Colum­bus and Cleve­land on Wednes­day before a stop later in the day in Toledo.

A big crowd at Bowl­ing Green shouted jeers when Obama said Romney’s eco­nomic plan was cen­tered on cut­ting taxes for the rich.

“Don’t boo,” Obama said. “Vote.”

Most recent polls show Obama with a lead over Rom­ney in Ohio, a state con­sid­ered a must-win for both. Obama held a 53 per­cent to 43 per­cent lead over Rom­ney in a CBS/New York Times poll released Wednes­day by Quin­nip­iac University.

Michael Zickar, chair­man of both the psy­chol­ogy depart­ment at Bowl­ing Green State Uni­ver­sity and the Wood County Demo­c­ra­tic Party, acknowl­edged that there was lit­tle excite­ment for Obama on cam­pus up until the last few months.

Now the president’s cam­paign is more vis­i­ble on cam­pus than it was four years ago and has more vol­un­teers sign­ing up stu­dents to vote, he said.

Whether the stu­dents know how much they could sway the elec­tion isn’t clear, Zickar said. “The cam­paign cer­tainly knows that,” he said.

Royce Ector, a junior at Bowl­ing Green from Detroit, said Obama vol­un­teers on cam­pus ask him three or four times a day whether he’s reg­is­tered to vote.

Obama wants to make tax cred­its for col­lege expenses per­ma­nent and expand Pell grants for stu­dents from lower-earning families.

Rom­ney coun­ters that increas­ing fed­eral stu­dent aid encour­ages tuition to go up and wants pri­vate lenders to return to the fed­eral stu­dent loan pro­gram. He pro­poses elim­i­nat­ing duplica­tive fed­eral col­lege finan­cial aid pro­grams and giv­ing Pell grants to “stu­dents that need them most.”

Obama won two-thirds of the vote four years ago among college-age adults 18–24 and 18–29 years old, accord­ing to exit polling. In Ohio, young vot­ers went more heav­ily Demo­c­ra­tic than in any elec­tion since at least 1992.

But there are ques­tions about whether young peo­ple are enthu­si­as­tic this time around and will turn out for Obama like they did in 2008.

Josh Prest, a 21-year-old polit­i­cal sci­ence major and for­mer head of col­lege Repub­li­cans at Youngstown State Uni­ver­sity, said he saw more polit­i­cal inten­sity two years ago dur­ing the Ohio governor’s race.

Why? “I don’t think anyone’s happy with either of the two can­di­dates,” he said. “I know I’m not.”

Julie DeAr­mond, a Bowl­ing Green senior, voted for Obama four years ago, but she’s not sure if he’ll get her vote this time around. “There’s a lot of things he said he would do, and I’m not sure he’s done them,” she said.

Some stu­dents were encour­aged by their pro­fes­sors to see Obama, the first sit­ting pres­i­dent to visit the Bowl­ing Green cam­pus since Ronald Rea­gan in 1984.

DeAr­mond got extra credit for being at the rally. “It’s an incen­tive,” she said.

Posted by AP News on Sep 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.