App State Students Gear up for Election Day

Election season is in full swing at Appalachian State, with political bumper stickers, voter registration volunteers, and a genuine uneasiness about the outcome. All eyes are on November 5; everyone knows this election will shape the future.

Appalachian State students were polled on September 23 on Yik Yak—a social media app that connects local college students anonymously, where they can communicate with each other on a message board—about who they would be voting for in the presidential election. Over 1,000 students participated in the poll.

The users who voted were overwhelmingly supportive of Kamala Harris with the poll showing 934 users were voting for her compared to 190 voting for Donald J. Trump with third-party candidates receiving 62 votes and 67 users opting out of voting in the election.

There are some caveats with this poll. A poll taken among college students will generally skew liberal due to college students generally being more liberal compared to other demographics. Also, messaging boards can create echo chambers so the Appalachian State Yik Yak messaging board may fall into that category based on the results of the poll.

Appalachian State trending blue like most colleges hasn’t stopped conservative activists from coming to campus to share their viewpoints and to help Trump get elected. A group of local students set up a table on campus to support Trump for this election. They gave out Trump signs and stickers to help encourage people to vote as well as register people to vote.

Liberal-leaning students went up to the booth of the Trump supporters to offer counter dialogue and it led to civil discussions and debates among the college students. The volunteer at the event in the above-linked clip said this about a debate she was having with someone at the event, “We were just talking, he’s a catholic, I’m a catholic but he has different views from me and we talked about how far your conservative and catholic values go in the case of abortion and why I support Trump.”

When asked whether she thinks Appalachian State is more conservative than most college campuses she said, “Any state school is going to be liberal, but you do still have your conservative population on all campuses, and we need to be able to represent them and feel like they have a voice.”

Appalachian State recently held a public forum called “Elections Unmasked” about the importance of voting, civic responsibility, and the impact of young voters. The forum was led by Amorah Din, the student body vice president, Phillip Ardoin, professor of American politics and the chair of government and justice studies and Barb Krause, a local attorney.

Speaking on the importance of the young vote Ardoin said, “The candidates know if 22-year-old and 24-year-olds are voting at high rates and turning out, and when you do they are going to be more concerned about your issues, about your policy preferences because they know that’s the next group of constituents who are going to turn out and vote at the next election.”

Krause said that election season can cause problems at school and can lead to unintentional crimes, “Under North Carolina law it’s actually a felony and I don’t mean to scare anybody by talking about legal stuff but it[ is a felony to accept anything of value for going to vote. As an example, she pointed out, “for a professor for example to give you credit in a class to go to vote could put both the professor and the student in jeopardy.”

On the importance of voting in local elections Ardoin said, “On the local level over the last 20 years since I’ve been at App, we’ve had over 20 elections decided by less than 100 votes and we’ve had about five decided by less than a dozen.”

If you want to listen to the full forum click on this link.