Skip to main content

Delaware High School Students more Libertarian than their parents (no big surprise)

Browsing through the Hockessin Community News this morning [admittedly, primarily interested in finding the coupon for the Crownery Chinese Restaurant] and I discovered two things:

First, HCN has joined the rest of the media in the deplorable practice of not reporting anything except Democratic or Republican votes in elections: Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney, and Chuck Baldwin were left out of their Presidential totals. In a way, I can understand that--how many of the 37 Presidential candidates do you report?

But in Delaware the case should be different. That Jeff Brown managed over 1,000 votes for Governor in the Blue Enigma Party is news; likewise the showings of Mark Parks (Libertarian) for Congress and Tom Savage (Independent) for Insurance Commissioner. Several thousand Delaware citizens voted for these candidates--what do they have to do to at least get their votes recorded by the media?

Second, the HCN reported on the results of the High School Mock Election, conducted by the Delaware Department of Elections. Ironically, the HCN reported all the results here, possibly because they could not ignore the following:

For Congress, Mark Parks (L) received 9% of the vote (4,542)
For Governor, Jeff Brown (BEP) received 8% (4,111)
For Lieutenant Governor, Peter Cullen (BEP) received 11% (5,124)
For Insurance Commissioner, Tom Savage (I) received 17% (8,247)

This could mean that some high school students didn't take the election that seriously, which is probably what Demopublicans would like you to believe.

I tend to think it is a snapshot of young people caught before the restrictive nature of the American political system has deluded them into thinking there are only two choices: this Statist or that Statist.

These are American citizens who still have open minds (at least in much higher percentages than their parents), and we need to court them before their thinking becomes ossified by the status quo.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I am attempting to form a youth caucus within the Boston Tea Party. Young people are willing to become more involved in politics these days, which is a positive in my opinion.
Joe said…
Maybe the high schoolers who voted Independent or Libertarian knew what they were doing, but I've got to believe a significant number of those who voted "Blue Enigma Party" did so just for the comic relief value.

I mean, hell, I actually had a moment in the voting booth where I considered pushing the BEP button for governor solely to amuse myself, knowing that even without my vote Markell would still absolutely smoke Bill Lee.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...