Hear from a Historian

Suzanna Luptakova

Named, The Overlooked Power of the Other Swing Voter, the topic of this webinar was

swing-voting and the power those voters hold. To find more on the statistics on swing voting,

particularly about young people of color, a partnership with the Center for Antiracist Research,

GenForward at the University of Chicago, and Black Voters Matter sent out a survey. ⅓ of the

respondents answered that they didn’t plan to vote for various reasons. The results indicated that

many of the respondents are frustrated with the current political system, some think that their

vote doesn’t matter, and others are unable to vote because of citizen laws. In this webinar, the

panelists explained how young people are seen as “unreliable” voters by politicians, leading to

the candidates not focusing on them. However, the reason that young people don’t vote as much

is that they want to be more informed before they vote, unlike past generations. The panelists

argued that to get young people to vote, politicians have to earn the vote by engaging the

younger populations.

These historians seemed to be in conversation with regular people who would be able to

communicate the needs of young people to candidates. They were pushing against the

predominant narrative that young people, young people of color especially, are not engaged in
politics when in reality the politicians don’t engage with them and don’t align with their views.

Before this, I didn’t know much about how young people don’t tend to get information on

primary elections and such as I live in an area that talks a lot about current events and politics.

This webinar expanded my scope of understanding on this topic as I realized that the reason I

didn’t know about this is that I receive information on candidates even though I’m not of voting

age.

Something that the lecturers did well was presenting information clearly and explaining

what it meant. A lot was talked about and they did a really good job at making sure everything

was understood. However, by the end of the webinar the panelists began to repeat themselves

and each other. I think there were too many panelists and since they had to wait for their turn to

speak, many times a person that spoke before them talked about what they were planning to talk

about so they either had to repeat it or talk about something new. If they had planned things out

more in advance I think it would have been better.

By attending this lecture, I learned more about politics and how young people are not as

involved in it. Something interesting that I learned which contributed to my understanding of

United States history was that throughout history no civil rights movement happened without

young people and all these movements have been made by them. This final fact slightly

contradicts what we learned in class as we usually learn about older people in class.