After months of speeches, debates and ads, it all ends tomorrow.
Americans will head to the polls to pick the president for the next four years — Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.
Students will be among them. The Daily Gamecock spoke with some from USC who have been engaged in the campaign.
They told us why they support their candidate, why others should as well — and what they’ve seen on the trail. Here’s what they said:
Morgan Lowder knows South Carolina will vote for Mitt Romney.
The Palmetto State hasn’t gone blue since then-Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, and U.S. President Barack Obama hasn’t stopped here once in his entire re-election campaign.
So Lowder, president of USC’s 20-member chapter of Young Democrats, isn’t wasting his time here either.
Instead, the third-year political science student and 13 other USC student Obama supporters are campaigning in North Carolina, where the race is more contentious.
“What we’re doing in South Carolina is trying to make North Carolina go blue,” Lowder said. “We think it’s going to go blue, but it needs South Carolina’s help.”
Lowder, who also serves as a head organizing fellow for Obama’s South Carolina campaign, is already in Charlotte working at a staging location to organize volunteers flowing in from around the Southeast.
His fellow College Democrats will board a bus and make the 130-mile trip from Columbia to Lumberton, N.C., today, where they’ll go door-to-door encouraging people to vote for Obama’s re-election.
Lowder believes the difference between the two candidates is stark; he said the election will be crucial USC students and those across the nation.
“This election is really going to be a decision on which way we want this country to go,” he said. “I’d say the president is the only option. He’s the only one who represents our interests. He’s the only one who wants to help us out.”
He pointed primarily to Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which allows students to be a part of their health insurance plans until age 26, as well as the president’s plans for Pell Grant funding and student loans.
But if both the president and his campaign seem to have largely given up hope on the Palmetto State, why should the average USC student vote for Obama?
“Nobody can say their vote doesn’t matter,” said USC College Democrats Vice President Dylan Knight. “If students don’t believe their vote counts there, they’re much mistaken.”
The fourth-year history student said while South Carolina won’t pick Obama in the election, each vote weighs much more significantly in local, state and Congressional elections.
Lowder said voting itself is crucial for students — it’s an exercising of their rights as U.S. citizens.
“We still have to represent ourselves as students, and as young people we’re a very important demographic,” he said.
And, Lowder said, if a change in South Carolina’s leaning is to come, it will be in this generation.
“We need to have a voice and be proactive,” he said. “We’re the future — if we want to make this state go blue we’ve got to be involved.”