Music for Change

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim/The walls of my room are closing in/There's a war outside still raging/You say it ain't ours anymore to win/...Well we made a promise/we swore we'd always remember/No retreat, baby, no surrender    --Bruce Springsteen

This past fall saw the most musical presidential campaign in over fifty years, since the days when Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and other members of the People's Songsters played for the third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace. The Vote for Change tour presented major stars like Bruce Springsteen, Jurassic 5 and the Dixie Chicks to hundreds of thousands of fans. Russell Simmons's Hip Hop Summit Action Network and Sean Combs's Vote or Die tour brought voter registration and messages of political engagement to young people of color and to communities often ignored by the political process. From stadium shows to coffeehouses, punk rockers, rap artists, rockers, country stars and folkies focused on the election; the Air Traffic Control project (www.airtrafficcontroltower.net) documents more than 300 election-related music events focused on progressive change.

But for all that activity, the youth vote was widely described as "disappointing," and thus the efforts of the musicians were deemed unsuccessful--even a failure in some people's eyes. Exit polls suggested that only 17 percent of voters were 18 to 29, the same percentage as in 2000.

Were these results really so disappointing from the progressive point of view? It depends on how you look at it. Youth voting participation may not have grown faster than other groups', but keeping pace with the largest voter turnout in three decades meant raising turnout from 42 percent of potential young voters in 2000 to 51 percent in 2004, which translated into more than 4.5 million more young voters than in 2000, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning and Engagement. In the ten most contested states, the youth turnout was 64 percent, 13 percentage points higher than in 2000. These voters disproportionately voted progressively: While Gore beat Bush 48 percent to 46 percent among voters 18 to 29 in 2000, Kerry won that age group 54 percent to 44 percent. Youth voters, in fact, were the only age group that gave a majority of votes to Kerry.

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