St. Kate's students raise their voices on Super Tuesday

On March 3, St. Kate’s joined Minnesota and thirteen other states in voting in the 2020 Presidential Primaries. Known colloquially as Super Tuesday, this one day of mass voting can make or break the race for candidates.

According to a poll taken across campus, St. Kate’s students leaned heavily Democratic, with 62 percent of those polled voting for Bernie Sanders. Another 35 percent cast their votes for eventual dropout Elizabeth Warren, while the remaining 3 percent chose to write-in a candidate. 

Statewide, Joe Biden captured the vote of Minnesotans and won the state’s delegates. According to MinnPost, Biden led with 38.6 percent of the vote, with 96.4 percent of precincts reporting. Bernie Sanders fell behind with 29.9 percent. Some speculate that Minnesotan Senator Amy Klobuchar’s decision to dropout before Super Tuesday and endorse Biden might have been the push that ultimately won him the state. 

Some St. Kate’s students showed interest in Klobuchar themselves. About 28 percent of those polled indicated that they would have been interested in voting for one of the candidates that had dropped out before Super Tuesday, with 66 percent of that group marking a preference for Klobuchar. 

Unfortunately, voter turnout among young adults remained low this Super Tuesday, though there may be multiple reasons for the small numbers.

“I have heard stories about polling places near universities not having a very large capacity,” One anonymous student voter mentioned. “So students who would like to vote near their college have very long wait times.”

Another said, “I registered the day of election and it was not as smooth of a process as I thought it would be. I didn't have my state ID and the volunteer/person helping me register did not seem to understand that I just needed my student ID because St. Kate's sent over the list of students who live on campus.”

Nawojka Lesinski, Assistant Professor at St. Kate’s in the Economics and Political Science department, offered her own outlook on the low turnout.

“Younger people… tend to be more disillusioned,” Lesinski stated when asked about the history of young adults not showing up to the polls. “That’s not to say that younger people aren’t politically active because they’re more politically engaged and active than ever before.”

St. Kate’s students have always been actively engaged and interested in politics, including voting, but many of the students who said they did not vote on Super Tuesday cited time as being the main obstacle to getting to the polls, a common refrain across the nation.

“We can’t say that young people don’t care about issues anymore because that’s not true,” Lesinski continued. “They’re just not voting. They think that those other forms of engagement are more important than the voting.”

Those other forms of engagement include events like Student Senate’s Day at the Capitol on March 10, in which a busload of students drove to Minnesota’s capital to witness politics in action. These events show that Katies are actively thinking about and participating in the democratic process, and the enthusiastic Political Science club operating on campus contributes their own range of opportunities for students.

When it comes to choosing a candidate to support, whether that be this coming November or the next round of presidential primaries, Lesinski made a few suggestions for college students and first-time voters.

“You don’t have to be aware of everything. It’s almost impossible to be aware of everything. When going and voting, look at not just the candidates, because candidates are just representative of something bigger. Look beyond the candidates to the specific issues that they are proposing.”

Similarly, when thinking about the future of politics, Lesinski cited some of the changes happening at St. Kate’s.

“There’s been a bump in declarations of Political Science majors. There’s been a bump in people interested in taking [Political Science] classes… and so we’ve been offering more classes.”

With nearly nine more months to go until the 2020 Presidential elections in November, St. Kate’s students have plenty of time to make a decision, using the resources the university offers to actively engage in politics and make their voices heard, on and off the campus.