From the Boston Tea Party, to the Whiskey Rebellion, to the struggle for civil rights, and opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, vocalizing disagreement with the government has been a theme of American history. But in the Trump era we are seeing something new, protests on a scale and at a frequency previously unseen. The question now is: will the rallies have an impact on policy or voter turnout? And, secondarily, to what extent is youth participation propelling the movement?
Throughout 2017 there were an estimated 8,700 protests, and an estimated 5.9-9 million protestors, according to Crowd Sourcing Consortium. The website Countlove.org puts the number of protests at 11,1149.
Reporter LA Kauffman said in an opinion article for The Guardian entitled “We are Living through a Golden Age of Protest,” “this is certainly more people in absolute terms than have ever protested before in the US. Even when you adjust for population growth, it’s probably a higher percentage than took to the streets during the height of the Vietnam anti-war movement in 1969 and 1970.”
Maggie Carroll, a Liberal Arts major at Mercer, told the VOICE, “I remember seeing marches for gun laws and marches for Black Lives Matter, and when people my age go to them, it motivates me to become involved myself. Seeing so many people from the younger generations at the marches, it was a really good feeling.”
Kauffman explains that “6,000 local resistance groups have united with affiliations with Indivisible, the advocacy protest group founded by two former congressional staffers. Most, if not all, of these groups, are consistently active.”
He continues, “This alone represents a breadth and depth of organizing with little, if any, precedent in American history. Many of these groups are digging into grassroots electoral work in their areas, hoping that this wave of street actions will translate into a decisive blue wave in the November 2018 midterm elections.”
A Pew Research Center article titled “Activism in the Social Media Age” states, “Engagement in these activities varies by age: Americans ages 18 to 49 are more likely than those ages 50 and up to have recently changed their profile picture to show support for a cause (23 percent vs. 13 percent), looked for information on social media about rallies or protests in their area (24 percent vs. 13 percent), or used hashtags related to a political or social issue (20 percent vs. 8 percent).”
The Pew study does not break down or separate the millennials and the Gen Xers in terms of behavior. The vast majority of the organizing in the past two years has been lead by adults, but after the Parkland school shooting, teenagers took a much more visible role specifically leading the March for Our Lives..
However, as Sociology Professor Dana R. Fishe wrote for The Washington Post, “The D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old.”
Fisher continues to say, “Participants were also more likely than those at recent marches to be first-time protesters. About 27 percent of participants at the March for Our Lives had never protested before.”
With hashtags like #Metoo, #Blacklivesmatter, and #Neveragain being used more than 30 million times on Twitter, it has become easier to spread activist messages across the nation. Social media has helped organizers to spread awareness about major issues.
This begs the question: does protesting affect politics?
“Yes,” Tommy Leung, a co-founder of Countlove.org tells the VOICE. “The protests help to some degree. I think that, certainly, historically, there is some evidence to suggest that we don’t need to see if protests make a difference…it’s very obvious they are not enough alone.”
He went on to say “In order to make a difference you have to change policy, and you have to change who sets the policy. And that means voting.”
A VOICE survey of 50 Mercer students shows 42 percent were registered and intend to vote, compared to the 58 percent who said that they were not registered and did not intend to do so.
Compare this to the national average of 48 percent of millennials who voted in the 2016 election. Considering 2018 is a midterm and not a primary election year, these numbers are expected to go down, so Mercer would seem to mirror the national averages.
As Professor DeRosa, a political science professor at Mercer explains, “I just think younger people don’t consider [voting] as important as they should…They would be the key to this election, to register and vote.”
The effect the past two years of street protests will have on voting choices and turn out this coming midterm election is yet to be seen, but on Election Day, November 6, we will find out.
