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:
In 2008, Matt Orr hadn’t registered to vote.
But four years after Barack Obama was propelled to victory by a message of hope and the broad support of young people, Orr, a fourth-year political science student, has gotten deep into politics.
He’s the S.C. Republican party’s deputy political director for research, and while he’s gearing up for the election Tuesday, his focus is off the presidential race and on local and state contests instead.
Still, he’s done some work for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, making phone calls to voters in hotly contested swing states.
The state party hopes to have made a total of 500,000 calls for state and national races before the election’s over, and many are headed elsewhere. More than 50,000 of them, Orr said, have gone to North Carolina, 20,000 to Ohio and another 20,000 to Iowa, all swing states where the election could come down to the wire — and pick the ultimate winner.
The party’s volunteers, Orr said, have also scattered, traveling to Nebraska, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.
“We’ve definitely seen some of our resources go out of state this election cycle, because it is such a tight presidential election,” Orr said. “It’s going to go down to the wire Tuesday.”
Some USC students have made the trip, too.
Lauren Luxenburg, a fourth-year political science student and co-chairman of the USC College Republicans, is one of them.
She’s in Ohio, putting up signs, going door-to-door and making calls. Others in the College Republicans are doing the same, and they’ve hit five other states, Luxenburg said — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Nebraska and Ohio.
And by and large, they’re doing so, Orr and Luxenburg said, for one reason: the economy.
The way Orr sees it, young voters were inspired by Obama’s message of change in 2008, but this year, they’re “more level-headed” and “realistic,” thinking about how the election — and a sluggish economic recovery — will affect them personally, he said.
“I think they’re just ready to see the American economy get back moving again,” Orr said. “I think once you graduate college, everyone’s ready to have their own slice of the American dream, to get out there on your own, to get a decent job.”
That’s gotten the Republican base energetic, he said.
Now, a group of USC students comes to the state Republican party’s phone bank nearly every day, he said, not to mention the handful of others that have traveled elsewhere.
“Our generation’s future prosperity is at risk with the election on Tuesday,” Luxenburg wrote in a later email response. “We can expect a recovery with Romney, or no recovery at all.”