Whenever Nick Smyth, a junior at Harvard University, goes out stumping for the presumptive democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, he doesn’t think too much about what he’s wearing. A T-shirt and jeans, he says, sometimes a Students for Kerry T-shirt over his button-down — nothing too grand, nothing too proletarian. “I just go out trying to look clean and neat, a college student,” he says. “Respectable. The average voter might be too taken aback if you’re too dressed up.”
The six-foot-three-inch Smyth, a lifelong democrat, was upset over the results of the 2000 election and felt the Supreme Court handed down a terrible decision with regard to the vote count. He’s been mobilizing students on campus, going door to door, asking people if they’ve registered and explaining Kerry’s views. He even walked over to the Bush for Students table and attempted to get on their mailing list. He was recognized and told to leave.
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But it wasn’t the anti-war slogans or the tie-dye T-shirts, or even the long hair that gave him up. While he did protest the war, he doesn’t wear tie-dye, or have long hair. Perhaps, he looked a little too man of the people?
“I don’t think that’s the case,” he says. “The democrats on campus are more hip, but we don’t dress so different. The republicans probably wear more expensive clothes. But in general, the political types always try to dress up. Harvard tends to dress overly preppy, so I guess we might all look like republicans at times.”
Over at nearby Yale, Robert Chung, chair of the Yale Students for Bush, doesn’t think the apparel proclaims anything these days. “It’s really not about how you look or dress,” he says. “I mean, we all look the same. “It all depends on your mentality. Some people like to be part of the rebel groups on campus — and the republicans here are the rebels.”
When Chung started to organize the student volunteers for Bush, he thought he would have a hard time ferreting out the Bush supporters. “You can’t tell by the way anyone’s dressed,” he says. “But I found that there are many closet republicans in this school. They were either too afraid or couldn’t find anyone to affiliate with. A lot of students are leaning more towards the right.”
Sheri Valera, the Florida State Chair for Students for Bush was also surprised by the turnout of republican supporters on her campus at the University of Florida. “There were people from all backgrounds,” she says. “In all styles of dress, from surfing to Nascar.”
Karen Harmel, a Kerry volunteer on the same campus says, “It’s pretty hard to tell who’s a democrat and who’s a republican. And we don’t encourage the student volunteers to dress one way or the other. None of the voters expect us to look a certain way because we’re for Kerry.”
Perhaps the populist, centrist image that every Beltway operative tries to project these days is a result of this kind of bottom-up, grass-roots politicking. And the tight 2000 race was testament to the fact that both parties need to move toward the center, which, by definition, is about trying to look every bit the every man as possible. With both sides trying to lay claim to this generic, tabula rasa appeal.
“Conservative college students are everywhere these days,” Chung says. “I don’t know if that means it’s popular to be republican now.”
In truth, though political interest among students is on the rise, it’s still not exactly popular these days. While more than half of college students in the late Sixties and Seventies voted in national elections, only about a third voted in 2000, and projections show just slightly more will vote this year, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
“The majority of people grow up in households whose parents don’t vote,” says Curtis Gans, director of the Committee. “And there’s nothing in the student curriculum that gets them into politics.”
Smyth, for one, agrees. “I think it’s true that Harvard has a certain detachment from other parts of the country,” he explains. “Kids on campus don’t see the inner-city poor. Everybody lives comfy lives here, and they might think that it doesn’t matter who’s president because Harvard will take care of us.”