Nearly half of Bakersfield College students will sit out the upcoming midterm elections on Nov. 2, a downturn from the previous election.
Of the 120 people polled on campus regarding who they will vote for in the gubernatorial race in California, 47.5 percent said they don’t plan to vote.
Among those who will vote, 30 percent of the students polled sided with Democrat Jerry Brown, and 19 percent of the vote went to Republican nominee Meg Whitman.
Less than one percent of the students polled said that they would vote but haven’t decided which candidate they will vote for.
Hamzah Hussein, 18, will vote in the election, but said that there is not a clear-cut favorite and that it’s anybody’s race at this point. “In my mind Brown has a slight edge,” said Hussein. “Just because he has experience and knows what he’s doing.”
The poll of strictly BC students showed that turnout for college students will most likely be down from the 2008 election, when an estimated 74 percent of voters aged 18-29 voted in the election.
“I’m just not really interested in [politics],” said Christy Martinez, 18.
Martinez said that if she were voting in the election, she would probably vote democrat.
The results do show that Democrats will likely still receive the majority of the youth vote like they did in 2008, when they received 66 percent of the estimated 22-24 million voters in the age group.