I had not planned on having this conversation.  It came up in the course of another discussion, the subject of which I cannot remember.  I asked this 20-something friend whether they had voted on November 2nd.  They said “no.”  I was perplexed by this response since they had made a point of voting in 2008 and had indicated, prior to the 2010 election, that they would be voting.  So, I did not let it drop.  I wanted to understand what happened.

“So, why did you not vote?” I asked.

“I did not get a chance to register to vote,” was their response.  This was not the first time that I had heard from a new voter the assumption that they had to register before voting in each election even if they had already registered.

“You only have to register once, assuming that you regularly vote,” was my comment.

They looked at me and responded “I did not realize that.”

The conversation could have ended there but what was most interesting was what came next.  My 20-something friend told me about an incident which took place on their campus in the immediate aftermath of the November 2nd election.  Apparently a reporter visited the campus to ask why younger voters had not voted at the same rate that they had voted in 2008.

“One of the people they interviewed,” my friend noted, “said exactly what I had been thinking.  In 2008 they made a point of the importance of voting in the election.  They made a point of reaching out to young people and speaking with us about why the election mattered and why our vote counted.  In this election no one did that.  We had almost no sense of what was at stake in the election.”  The “they”, in case you have not guessed, were the Democrats, as well as liberal and progressive constituency/advocacy groups.

I have been reflecting on this conversation ever since.  Sure, you can say that this and other 20-somethings should have taken initiative but that misses the larger point.  In 2008, this young friend of mine along with many others of their generation, were taught to recognize that something was at stake.  In 2010 this just did not happen.

In a debate in which I participated on Aljazeera immediately following the election, a similar issue came up.  What was interesting was that a representative of the Tea Party movement attempted to argue that youth have not benefited from the Obama administration and that this explained the lack of engagement.  Perhaps, but what is interesting is that those youth who did vote voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.

So, it is reasonable to believe that two factors played themselves out with youth.  One, that there was little significant attention given to energizing the youth vote.  The assumption that what worked in 2008 would carry over into 2010 was completely misplaced.  But the second factor is that the youth segment of the electorate, as with many other liberal and progressive voters, were not prepared to vote for the Republicans but were profoundly disappointed in the Democrats.

The discussion I had with my 20-something friend reminded me that no segment of the electorate can be taken for granted.  Inspiration in one electoral cycle can devolve into despair in the next.  But more importantly, the hope that many youth held in the results of the 2008 election were disappointed by a combination of the repeated premature compromising on the part of the Obama administration along with the influence of conservative Democrats.

Conclusion?  That a significant youth turnout in 2012 will necessitate more than outreach, as important as is outreach.  It will necessitate substance.  Specifically, can a social force come together that engages younger voters (and potential voters) in the fight for power?  Can youth not be called upon to vote for a messiah, but instead be mobilized by a progressive force to insist upon the change for which they believed that they were voting in 2008.

I don’t want to have the same conversation with my 20-something friend in the aftermath of the 2012 elections.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president ofTransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.