During the 2024–25 academic year, Alabama students found themselves at the center of national attention. Whether it was the president attending commencement or the wave of Israel-Hamas war protests across campus, everyday life became a reflection of national headlines.
From just the last semester, issues such as Senate Bill 129, federal funding cuts, deportation, Israel-Palestine, Trump’s commencement, and No Kings day received both student attention and action.
Despite this constant exposure to politics, many of my classmates are uninformed or uninterested in civic involvement beyond highly publicized or viral moments, such as presidential debates or online speech clips.
Last year brought one of the most controversial elections for the student body. While campus groups like UA Democrats and UA Republicans worked with Common Ground to promote political participation, there remains a serious lack of consistent and healthy engagement among students.
While youth voter turnout was higher in 2024 than it was in 2016, it was lower than 2020, suggesting a regression. This trend is not unusual, as the youth vote typically reports 20-30% lower than the older voting base. Duke professors found that the youth vote peaked in 1972, the year of the first election after the 26th Amendment was passed.
I also work in a restaurant where most of the evening staff are college students. On election night, one of my coworkers asked everyone on our dinner shift if they voted. Out of nearly 50 employees, only two of us — including the coworker asking— had actually cast a ballot.
This surprised me, as the circles I spend time with on campus are relatively active in national news and voting. But as the year continued and the university became more directly involved in political debates, I realized my coworkers were not the exception, they were the rule.
Wanting to understand this disinterest, I spoke with Jordan Swartz, student chair of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, who researches political participation and youth engagement.“The problem isn’t hopelessness among young voters, but frustration with the strict partisan binary that defines the politics of older generations,” he said. “To many students, it’s a sentiment of ‘I want to see politicians stop squabbling and do more to fix all these problems.”
That rang true on campus, especially among students who said their votes don’t matter in what they call a “joke” of a political environment. When the 2024 presidential election arrived, no one I knew expected a constructive presidential debate — and unfortunately, we weren’t wrong. Candidates talked over each other, traded insults and delivered the kind of meme-worthy one-liners our bingo cards had predicted.
More concerning than low voter participation is the lack of constructive discourse on campus, fueled by partisan intolerance and misinformation. Before Trump’s commencement address last May, UA Democrats highlighted protests and rallies against the event on their Instagram page. The counter organization, UA College Republicans, responded with a comment on their instagram that read, “We were disappointed to see the inflammatory reaction from our radical leftist counterparts, the UA College Democrats. They do not represent Alabama, and they do not represent our student body.”
An additional example of this is a student in my Blount class flat-out refusing to listen to arguments based on liberal values, let alone researching them or considering how those policies might improve society.
It is the intolerance of political perspectives from conflicting groups that destroys the attempts groups like Common Ground make to encourage conversations across the aisle. While discourse on campus occurs in controlled environments maybe once or twice a year, it is the aggressive rhetoric outside these events that undermines greater goals towards discourse.
Outside of partisan intolerance, misinformation drives aggressive political behaviors. The American Press Institute found that only 44% of Gen Z report consuming traditional news of any kind, and only 35% of younger Millennials. Instead, many young voters, especially college students, have begun to turn to social media platforms as a primary source of information. While social media platforms are easy to use for quick information, they often leave out evidence, use harmful rhetoric, and lock users into partisan echo chambers.
“We live in a world where the truth is functionally dependent upon where you get your news from,” Swartz said. “And when these different echo chambers paint the “other side” as evil, anti-democratic, and irredeemable, toleration becomes virtually impossible.”
That kind of intolerance, bred by rage-bait political framing, is a major barrier to civic participation.
Between disillusionment with politics and a lack of media literacy, Alabama students — and young voters more broadly — must recognize and reject the habits shaped by a system built for older generations.
As we move into a new academic year, it is only by acknowledging that many of us are not fully engaging civically, but are instead hiding behind excuses and partisan noise that we can begin to reclaim a democracy that reflects the will of the people.
