welcome to the westminster town hall forum where for thirty five years we have engaged in public and reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective all forms are free and open to the public and information on upcoming events located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce to you today speaker dr jennifer lawless is a professor of government at american university in washington d c and the director of the women and politics institute she describes herself this way i'm a forty year old self avowed political junky election day is my super bowl the sunday morning talk shows are my favorite reality t v and my computer search history shows that political wired dot com is my post most visited website this self involved political junkie graduated from union college in schenectady new york she has a b a in political science she then earned her m a and ph d in political science from stanford university with funding from the national science foundation she has conducted extensive research on electoral politics focusing on political ambition representation and gender in the electoral process she's a nationally recognized expert on women and politics and the co author of the book it still takes a candidate why women don't run for office her latest book with co author richard fox is the focus of today's presentation running from office why young americans are turned off to politics ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster town hall forum dr jennifer laws cockroaches head lice colonoscopies used car salesman traffic jams root canals and donald trump but all of these things have in common they're far more popular than the united states congress it's trail in head to head match ups and national random sample of americans sad that they find the charming things that i just mentioned far more appealing than their representatives in washington d now the house and senate might take solace in knowing that they rated a little bit higher other than playground bullies north korea and meth labs but to be perfectly honest the margins were quite close it's not just cute little poles that find this to be the case though the political climate has culminated in the most negative attitudes toward congress that we've ever seen the advent of modern polling doesn't even know what to do with these numbers not one in five voters trusts the government  what's right congressional approval hovers at around ten percent and senator john mccain even joked that congress is down to paid staffers and blood relatives approving of the job they do for decades pollsters  also found that although people have never been in love with congress they at least support their own incumbents but in two thousand and fourteen that iron clad reality was turned on its head to last year sixty percent of voters said that they supported replacing the entire congress including their own incumbent and roughly half of people said that if we were to replace the entire congress with random people walking down the street they would probably do a better job it's hard to find any evidence of people that think washington is doing what's right right now so what are the consequences of a political system that's held in such low regard what are the implications for democracy when politicians are viewed as so i effective and our political system so dysfunctional how does this bode for the future of a democracy and what does it mean for future generations well in a nutshell i'm going to argue that washington's dreadful performance over the past two decades has taken a toll on young americans who have come to know politics through this spectacle they see politics and politicians as pointless and unpleasant they see leaders as corrupt and selfish and they have no interest in entering the political arena avar but before i lay out this argument provide evidence for it and at least speculate as to how we might be able to change this i feel like i have to come clean about something it's true i am a political junkie but it's  worse than that as a two year old i was according to my parents quite obsessed with jimmy carter i loved his name i was completely inaccurate by his responsibilities and i very much worry for his legacy in so far as any topic could we pulled the lever in the one thousand nine hundred four presidential election when my mother let me go into the voting booth with are at age twelve i faced a very difficult summer vacation i had to decide whether to hang out with my friends or watch the iran contra hearings i should admit that i probably spent more time that summer with oliver north for him paul and john poindexter than anyone else by the time i was a junior in high school i knew my way around the senate judiciary committee hearing like nobody's business i can still recites several of the questions targeted at anita hill and in january of one nine hundred ninety six when my college roommate came home very upset about a breakup with a boyfriend i told her that i'd be more than happy to discuss it when bill clinton finished delivering the state of the union address and so growing up in a very politicized household where it was always impressed upon me that it was vital to stay abreast of current events and government it was no surprise that i became a political science major it was no surprise that i got a ph d in political science and frankly it was no surprise that i would actually run for office i might not have been vision to taking on a popular incumbent at a time when i was a professor at brown and had not yet received tenure but there was no question that was something i would ultimately do and i was proud to do it i've always thought that government was an effective way to solve problems that people who run for office actually have good intentions that a political career is noble and that there could be a little as satisfying that hearing and then heeding a call to public service so it's from that orientation that both richard fox and i wrote this book and i think that's also why we're both so just heartened by our results in running for office why young americans are turned off to politics we present the results of a national survey we conducted of several thousand and thirteen to twenty five year olds we asked them about their attitudes toward politics and current events their career aspirations and their political ambition and what did we find we found that eighty nine percent of them eighty nine percent had already unequivocally written off the idea of never running for office and frankly as difficult as it is for me to admit it's hard to blame them the current political system which is really the only one they've ever known has turned them off consider their first political memory for some of the older people that we surveyed interviewed that was a president lying to them w his finger and saying he did not have sexual relations with that woman miss lewinsky for others it was a president lying to them this time about weapons of mass destruction they've experienced a government shutdown they know only gridlock in a fish and se and dysfunction in washington and they see the same sad song played over and over and over again in the twenty four hour news cycle they'd be crazy to want to run for office so how do we arrive at this conclusion and perhaps more importantly what can we do about it that's what i'd like to spend next fifteen minutes or so talking about so let me just begin with a very sad state of affairs i should let you know that i am encouraged incredible past the most the glass is always entirely empty so you should take you should take my remarks from that from from the vein which i give them ok so in october of two thousand and twelve right in the heat of the presidential election we conducted a national survey of forty two hundred high school and college students so these were young people around the country we asked them about their political attitudes and aspirations the following summer we did our long phone interviews with a random sample of one hundred fifteen of them and what i'm going to demonstrate to you is that no matter how we ask the question and no matter how we analyze the data the story is the same today's young people have virtually no interest in running for office so we've that began by asking have you ever thought that someday when you're older you might be interested in running for office eighty nine percent said no eleven percent said it was something that had at least occurred to them from time to time we said ok even if it's never occurred to you think about it right now would you consider running for office in the future ninety three percent said no we then thought ok this is a problem but it's because these are abstract questions that we're asking so we presented young people with a couple of scenarios first we said to them if the following jobs all paid the same amount of money which would you most like to be and they could choose among a business owner a teacher a mayor of their town or a salesperson mayor of their town came in a distant third almost tied with salesperson we then presented them with another set of options again assuming that these jobs all paid the same amount of money what would you most like to be a lawyer a business executive a high school principal which frankly i think is the worst job in the world or a member of congress member of congress came in dead last and it wasn't even close and then we asked them about twenty different jobs from lawyer to teacher to journalist to doctor to nurse to electrician we presented them with a list of twenty jobs that included three political positions and we said check off any that you might ever be interested in thinking about doing so this is a very very low bar and they could check off as many as they wanted and out of these twenty mayor member of congress and president of the united states placed seventeenth eighteenth and nineteenth on the list the only thing that was less appealing was an electrician the next book will be about why young people don't want to be electricians and then in a final attempt to  get young people's attitudes toward running for office we asked them to tell us in their own words what they thought about it and let me just read you three quotes this is from charlotte high school junior from texas people in politics they're squirrely they say they're going to do something but they don't do it i don't want to be part of that fortan a college senior from new york i'm going into farming politics for people who like to bang their heads against the wall i'd rather milk cows than run for office and franklin a college sophomore from iowa by the time you're done with politics your hair has turned gray i want to keep my hair not gray i've never run for office so it's hard to imagine more consistent evidence of the fact that this generation high school and college students today can think of little that is more an appealing than entering the electoral arena as a candidate now identifying this lack of interest in running for office is one thing understanding its roots is another and essentially our argument is that the daily lives of young people don't involve politics and it's not because they're tuned out it's it's worse than that this is not just some naive lack of exposure to what's going on in the world it's that they are consciously making an effort not to be engaged because they're so turned off when they encounter politics they actually try to minimize their exposure and shy away from it and this happens in three different ways or maybe it's better to say for three different reasons so let me just give you a brief summary of each the first has to do with family and the way they experience politics in the household let me just give you some key facts now remember this survey was taken in the fall of two thousand and twelve in the middle of the presidential election seventy five percent of young people said that their parents never talk about politics at home eighty percent said that they have never had a political discussion with their parents a meal fifty percent said they have never had a political discussion with their parents ever five percent said that they had a parent who ever suggested that they run for office two percent said that they had two parents who suggested that they run for office no matter how we look at these questions it's clear that young people are not getting a message in their homes that running for office is something that they should consider and several of them made points about why they didn't feel that these conversations took place david a college freshman said for example in my family we don't talk about political stuff washington politicians are miserable they're terrible and a million miles away why should we bother with that jena high school junior my parents never want  talk about government stuff they still don't know and when it does come up they quickly say that the system is too broken to pay attention to it's not worth our time or lizbeth a college senior oh we do talk about it we have big debates dinner they start out being debates about important issues but we then just wind up condemning the whole government for being so dysfunctional and ridiculous so in fact we've got to ask these young people what would your parents think if you told them that you wanted to run for office and their answers were all politically correct they all said my parents want me to do whatever would make me happy but then they almost all followed up with a sentence along the lines of but i can't imagine they'd think that would make me happy or they'd be shocked or i think they'd be sad they know i can be so much more than that with now these family dynamics matter because family is the most important socializing agent in young people's lives so young people whose parents have encouraged them to run for office are five times more likely to have considered young people who talk with their parents about politics even just on occasion are four times more likely than those who never have to consider running for office and high school and college students whose parents told them that they should actually run are six times more likely to have thought serious about that prospect and the problem though is that these families are few and far between and why wouldn't they be gallup asked a national random sample of adults about the honesty and ethics of people who work in twenty two different professions about eighty percent of people for example thought that nurses had high or very high honesty and ethics seventy percent said that they had faith in pharmacists teachers doctors and military officers politicians fared a little bit worse fewer than twenty five percent of americans rated local office holders such as mayors or city councilors as high on ethics and integrity that number was cut in half down to fourteen percent for state legislators and members of congress who are viewed as honest and ethical and less than ten percent of those surveyed the only people that performed worse than members of congress were lobbyists so parents with busy lives many of whom are struggling to get by likely see little point in discussing with their families the latest failure in washington d c or the most recent negative campaign ad that's on the television screen although political disengagement by both adults and young people is not a new phenomenon these recent polls and surveys suggest that now it's far worse than in previous generations and our analysis makes clear that the tenor of politics is part of the reason and the consequences are also far reaching the second reason at school with their friends and through the media young people also shy away from politics let me start with those facts again in high schools among high school students sixty five percent report that they've never had a conversation with their classmates about anything political when we asked about twelve areas of discussion young people might have with their friends school crushes dating sports food entertainment just seventeen percent said that they ever talk about politics it came in twelve out of twelve on that list and website used reflects a similar pattern social networking music shopping sports entertainment all garner far more attention from young people than any kind of political or current events website and this disengagement again is not by mistake when young people look around and they look at washington d c they see and they reported to us contention and ugliness and so thoughtful debates over important issues com conversations about issues that matter our allien propositions to them when they're with their friends they say that they don't want to argue they don't want to debate they don't want to deliberate so politics is off the table but they can articulate these thoughts better than i can so again let me just read you a couple of quotes this is rebecca high school sophomore most of my friends are big time texters they don't care about things outside the texting world i don't even know what that but that's what younger people do we just don't care about politics we focus on other things you know the things that matter places where we can make a difference ashley a college sophomore from los angeles if i bring up anything more specific with my friends than a simple fact like hey obama won the election my friends are like i don't follow and then that makes me want to tell them that this is our country in that they should care but then they'll think i'm being antagonistic and we'll have a fight so i don't julian summarized the line of thinking best when he said no we never bring up politics politics kills the mood so it's hard to argue with this perception we live in a time when all national news almost all national news about politics is negative and combative in tone it's almost as though there's no place for thoughtful journalism or positive news coverage and when media outlets aren't highlighting washington's inability to get the job done they're featuring political coverage that often amounts to partisans on both sides of the stories lambasted the republican controlled house of representatives and then the next day and we see the exact same thing and it's not only television that presents politics as an effective late night comedians reinforce these messages jon stewart describe then late night and now tonight show jimmy fallon said this it was mostly a symbolic vote that accomplished nothing or as congress calls a vote so young people's exposure to politics and current events does tell us that they're not fully aware of what's going on in the world and that's awful and it's terrible but it also demonstrates that they have very little incentive to garner the kind of information that would make them more informed consumers again though those few young people who do talk about politics with their friends who do surf the web and find political websites who do follow news regularly are on average about six times more likely to say that they might be interested in running for office and the third basic reason that young people move away from politics is because of the politicians in general yuck is the word that kept coming up over and over and over again and again the facts six out of seven high school and college students do not think that politicians are at all interested in helping people four out of five do not think that they are smart or hardworking and young people were far more likely to describe politicians as dishonest than honest corrupt than good natured and selfish then self less and in the open ended responses from our surveys and our interviews this sentiment came out very very quickly some of their perceptions were actually amusingly inaccurate so one young man for example said that he was concerned about the people on capitol hill from what i understand he told us most members of congress have a criminal record another album on the fact that most members of congress have been there for more than fifty  thinks it's time for some change but more prevalent than these factually inaccurate statements were a general sentiment where young people think of politicians as self interested liars who are further corrupted by the system most politicians are hypocrites said a college sophomore of their two faced they say one thing to get elected and then they turn around and do what's best in their own interest they seem like they're usually out for themselves politicians have to lie all the time that's just what politicians do politician suck in my opinion i don't know how to put it exactly well yes i do politicians are just liars sometimes it sounds like they're lying all the time politicians it's not good the people themselves probably started out good at the beginning but then they had to sell out if they wanted to get anything done and then they don't seem so good anymore so today's young people can't imagine entering a system like that and adopting the traits that they perceive as necessary to thrive in it and many of today's high profile politicians give them good reason to think this now if we had all day i could chronicle all of the examples of lying and adultery that i'm completely obsessed with in congress and on capitol hill and i could provide you with those but it's not only scandals and adultery that are the problem here consider representative steve king so he's a republican from iowa he dug his heels in over immigration and in congress challenged democratic senator floor and called the pair as un american as you can get ted cruz a pit in my eyes the unwillingness to compromise by shutting down the government just because he could even though many of his republican colleagues said they were concerned because they had no plan to reopen the government so although immigration campaign finance and health care are all topics worthy of serious debate and deliberation thoughtful discussion and progress is often a substitute by provocation and histrionics it's even reached a point where elected officials on both sides of the aisle are criticized when they behave responsibly charleston county republican party for example censured us senator lindsey graham for not being republican enough here in this distinction despite receiving a ninety two score out of one hundred from the american conservative union about what he expected supported president obama's supreme court nominee john mccain received a similar censure from the arizona republican party which condemned his quote long and terrible record of voting with liberal democrats because he voted with them to end the government shutdown liberal bloggers be rated democratic congressman who cooperated with republicans and mainstream democrats to reduce the deficit and the daily coast a popular left leaning blog referred to moderate democrats as a pile of suck these dynamics we've today's elected officials a little incentive for any kind of bipartisan cooperation now i know i know in this day and age it's very easy all or yawn or glossed over when we see stories of politicians behaving badly but it doesn't mean that public policy doesn't suffer when elected officials can't work together and it doesn't citizens from developing political attitudes based on this behavior unfortunately what this means is that the small percentage of high school and college students who view contemporary political leaders favorably that's a tiny fraction they're the only ones that are interested in running for office themselves so what can we do about this i told you i painted a bleak picture but our political system is built on the premise that people will rise up and run for office we have more than five hundred thousand elective positions in this country so if the best of the brightest to future generations can think of nothing more unappealing than heeding the call to public service that obviously compromises the quality of us democracy but there is good news there is a little bit of a silver lining when we asked young people their goals for the future almost eighty percent said that they cared very much about improving the community and improving society this was right up there with achieving professional success getting married and having children they want to make about world a better place they just don't see running for office and serving in our political institutions as a way to do that so how do we change those minds there are no easy answers and the recommendations that i'm going to quickly propose are not magic bullets but they try to build on our findings that increasing young people's exposure to politics could actually go a long way toward generating interest in running for office we know that the more you see the more likely you are to find something that's somewhat appealing now it's tricky because that also means that you need to wade through a lot of mock to find an elected official that you think inspires you to find an example of politicians in a community getting things done but if you're willing to wade through that moch you might find a diamond or whatever appropriate metaphor i should have used there so let me just conclude today with two of the five reasons we lay out in the book two of the five recommendations we allowed in the book and i'm going to focus on two because you have to buy the book to find out what the other three so one one what we think pretty easy suggestion is to make political aptitude part of the college admissions process the primary goal for most twelve to seventeen year olds is to attend college eighty five percent of the high school students we surveyed said that that was their most immediate goal but it's entirely possible right now to apply to colleges even the most prestigious ones i know absolutely nothing about politics or current events you can't find iraq on a map that's ok we've only been there for a little more than a decade you don't know the name of the vice president no big deal we're going to have a new one soon you're unfamiliar with which party controls congress it's not going to change any time soon you'll have plenty of time to learn you can google it later why not link political aptitude to the college admissions process it could be in the form of a new entrance exam it could be an essay it could even just be a quickie little paragraph that you have to submit when you submit your applications the mechanism is almost irrelevant what would be required is letting people know that in order for their application to be taken seriously they need to be able to articulate even briefly some kind of problem some kind of concern some kind of issue that they care about it's a similar approach actually has been used in the past when college admissions officers made it clear that they cared about volunteering in the community in high school students levels of volunteer in the community went through the roof so if we could get college admissions officers to start valuing political aptitude or political interest among young students there is a chance that they would acquire the kind of information and they were acquired the increased exposure that might actually allow them to find something appealing in the political process a second suggestion is something that we call the go run app whether we like it or not we live in the era of the right you can upload photos request and find cheap airline tickets go to a mexican restaurant was into music do whatever you want to do with the simple touch of an app and young people do eighty one percent of people under the age of twenty five sleep with their phone next to them in bed seventy four percent reach for their smartphone as the first thing they do in the morning and ninety seven percent of teens report regularly using phones and smartphones in the bathroom so there's clearly no activity no time of day and no location that is out of bounds for smartphone use as disgusting as some of those might be so let's take advantage of this digital world by creating an app that makes it very easy to find out how to run for office what positions exist and what those responsibilities are surprisingly it's quite difficult right now to find out i mentioned that there are five hundred thousand elective offices there is no clearinghouse or database that has information about what those offices are what the requirements to run are what the responsibilities are or how you even filed to get on the ballot this op would allow users to enter an address and they would find out every elected position that represents that residence from presidents of the united states all the way down to dogcatcher figuring out how to become a candidate it would literally be at your fingertips educators could clearly incorporate this into their curriculum and young people who are even the least bit curious about how to run for office would not have to engage in a fact finding mission they might even find it somewhat amusing to just type in random addresses and find out what the opportunities are this easy to access information would also showcase that these hundreds of thousands of offices are not at all like what goes on in washington d c we could chip away at that national lens through which people assess the political system so at the end of the day there's no question our political system has done a number on young people it's turned them off to the idea of running for office it's discourage them from aspiring to be political leaders and it's galleon aided them from even thinking about a career in politics steering a new course will be difficult and we have to be creative but it's the only choice we have and we will be but i would be remiss not also to implore politicians to think seriously about the way that they do business when our elected officials cheer failed policies shut down the government accuse their opponents of trying to destroy the country and refuse to do their jobs they engage in more than hyperbole they damage more than the public's short term trust in government they undermine in the long term the future generations interest and faith in the system and their aspirations to be part of it they make it less likely in other words that parents will drill politicians names into their toddlers heads that those toddlers will become politically interested teenagers politically active young adults and middle age political candidates people always ask me if i'm happy that i lost my election to i feel like i dodged a bullet why would i want to be in washington i can honestly tell you that there is nothing i would rather be than in washington oh except here with you right now of course there was no bill it's a tie i still think that politics is noble i still think that heeding that call to public service is the best thing that we can do the call for the future is to make sure that i'm not the anomaly thank you forum our speaker today is jennifer lawless professor of government at american university and author of the book running from office why young americans are turned off to politics while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i want to thank again the co sponsors of today's forum hennepin county library with funding from the minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and the online news source men post those following on twitter may tweet questions to us and we're especially interested in questions from the students from fridley high school who are here in the audience with us today i would like to invite the radio audience to join us at westminster church for our next forum on thursday november nineteenth at noon when foreign policy expert andrew bass of it she will explore the topic the end dispensable nation america and the middle east our events are free and open to all and further information can be found  website westminster forum dot org and now dr all of us if you would return to the pulpit i will present the questions from our audience were at the aggregate level and there was some variation white students were actually a little bit less likely than african americans latinos to say that they were interested in running for office christian evangelicals were a little bit more likely to say that they were interested and among the college students women were less likely than men to say that they were interested and although this variation is important it's still hovering around this general ninety percent baseline of no interest whatsoever so it's not like these results are being driven by one small group of people that are particularly turned off north or south east or west high school or college men or women across race across ethnicity across religious affiliation young people are turned off to politics many of us have been watching the debates in the primary for both republican and democrat presidential candidates do you think those debates are doing much to change the attitude of young people toward politics and can you be specific i think these debates are reinforcing every single word i just talked about last night after this debate c n n put together a real of the highlights from the debate and that real included absolutely nothing about substance absolutely nothing about success absolutely nothing about getting things done it was the most amusing moments from the debate i will say that it's difficult because in some ways this is what viewers want we can blame the media and we can blame some of these debate moderators but the ratings have been through the roof this time around and when donald trump and ben carson said that if c and b c didn't accord to their preferences regarding format and length of time they would pull out c n b c had to accommodate them because they know that that's where they're getting their ratings from it seems to me that the biggest challenge right now is letting people know that we have a half a million elected offices around the country and in many of these positions and in many of these political institutions people are doing their jobs quite well and they are compromising they are getting things done communities do thrive states are being able to advance the problem is that we look at really bad behavior in washington d c we assumed that the people in gauged in that behavior are representative of all in officials across the board and that becomes the lens through which we assess government and politics and so i think one of the best ways to chip away at the idea that doing nothing is in fact a legitimate method to govern is to highlight some examples at the state and local levels where people do come together and you know keep in mind several thousand elected positions across the country are completely nonpartisan not only when you vote for people do not know whether they're democrats or republicans but the kinds of issues that they're charged with dealing with don't really have very clear partisan links to them and so turning young people on to politics by showcasing some of those examples of success might be one way to get around this problem benefits from the turn off of young people to politics i don't think anyone does except i guess that the people that benefit are the stunted student body presidents that are really excited that they're not going to have much electoral competition and they're going to continue to be in office if we can't inspire the best and the most interested and the most passionate of the next generation to run for office we're not going to have vacant offices we're going to have the same old same old and as a result i think generally speaking citizens across the country wind up suffering if you had the opportunity if you presented your findings and conclusions to politicians and if so what was your reaction it's  funny we presented some of the findings to the office of public engagement at the white house and they agreed that things are terrible we were on a panel with a couple of members of congress recently talking about the book so to newly elected women in congress  republican they very much blame the media for all of this we've then we're also on a panel that was moderated by c n n john king he very much blames the members of congress for this and so what we've seen from both the media and elected officials is the general sense that the findings are probably right and what we're picking up in our surveys and with these interviews is the current state of affairs who is to blame is a different question from our perspective we're happy to blame both of them and just move on you talked about the attitudes you got people toward the political process and toward politicians do young people vote and if so what moves them to vote and maybe not have a good attitude toward politician do they participate in the process we know over time young people have always been the least likely to vote voter turn out in general is nothing to praise ourselves about in this country and for young people it's even lower but that is the one area where we do seem to have seen at least sustained levels of engagement and it was the one area where when we asked young people about any political activity they have experience in their homes they did say about a third of them said that they remember going to vote with their parents or their parents voting themselves so that's the one area where there does seem to be this civic duty attached to it but that's where messages of civic engagement and political engagement tend to end and so whatever is motivating them to vote is not sufficient to motivate them to crease their exposure to politics more broadly this is from a student in the audience as a participant in  minnesota youth and government model assembly program sixteen hundred students strong mocked minnesota legislature what do you have to say to and about students who are actively involved in politics and have even run for mock office best thing that you can possibly do so we know that if you are involved in political extracurricular activities either in high school or college you're far more likely to develop the political and sustain it through life what happens is that young people's involvement in things like student government debate team mock trial are low those are not the kinds of activities that most people are interested in pursuing as high school students or college students but when those ingredients are there and when you have that exposure that's one of the hardest hurdles to clear initially once you've done that it's likely that you're going to continue to seek out political knowledge political information and ultimately run so i would say to all of you that your goal should be to get as many of your friends as many of your classmates to be involved in those activities too because those activities are a way to broaden their sense of what politics actually is and what government can actually do another question from a student in the audience you address to encourage a lot of interest in politics in the home what can be done in schools to encourage interest when i had mentioned that almost no parents regularly sustained encouragement among their children to run the parent numbers were actually the highest teachers coaches and other mentors are even less likely to encourage their best and brightest students to run for office in part because it's not a noble profession so if you think these kids have the opportunity to really achieve you're going to think about directing them into places where they might actually achieve the best thing that we can do is encourage teachers and encourage coaches and mentors to start thinking about politics and start thinking about as a path that should at least be on the radar screen in the future because if you receive that encouragement to run it doesn't matter the source that plants the seed and it's something that you think about later in life we have several questions coming in through the internet focusing on the costs of running a political campaign is that turning off young people to the decision of citizens united make a difference to them you know i wish it did because that would suggest that they knew what citizens united was you know a lot of adults that have previously been politically interested say that the fact that the typical congressional race now cost well over a million dollars or that super pacs have invaded our political process makes them decide they're not going to throw their hat into the ring the young people that we surveyed and interviewed were not thinking about the nuts and bolts involved in a campaign they weren't thinking about the rigors of withstanding you know an eighteen month race or taking on an incumbent or anything like that they just have this need jerk visceral black reaction to the idea of being involved in politics and so it's not like there's any public policy that's keeping them out it's the general way that business is conducted is there a country that the u s should look to for effective ways to  especially young voters you know political cultures varies so much we're not going to be a country that has mandatory voting right we're never going to send people fines because they didn't show up and vote on election day but what we can do is try and incentivize political interest that's why linking it to the college admissions process is one particular way but as long as we have this very pull yourself up by your bootstraps individual as underlying our political culture it's difficult to come up with any kind of national move the other thing that i should know is that young people being turned off to politics even if it's disheartening it's totally fine for all of the incumbents that keep getting reelected so there are also strange incentives here they don't want to do anything that's going to fundamentally change the system and potentially mitigate their likelihood of success historically young people have been a very involved campaign workers in a political campaign if they're not involved now who is running these campaigns so they're involved they're the eleven percent right and so they're still you can all we're always going to be able to identify and find some anomalies some people that are really political junkies some people that rally behind the candidate that are willing to knock on doors the problem is that that group of people that tends of the young people that are out there are not necessarily representative of the rest of the country and they're also such a small sliver it nine out of ten people feel sufficiently disengaged that they don't want to play an active role so it's not about worrying that candidates won't have people knocking on doors for them it's about broadening and casting a wider net to ensure that people from all different so there didn't seem to be much staying power and it's not that surprising right it's unlikely that's a very very high bar to place on one person right barack obama singlehandedly is supposed to change you know twenty five years of congressional dysfunction and socialized patterns that suggest that young people have no interest in politics so he was able to energize them around that particular election but unless there are consistent messages beyond election day that suggests that remaining engaged a vital useful and beneficial they're not going to number of questions coming forward about where young people tend to get their news these days this one from a student as a student i'm much more willing to get my political information so the shows actually don't do damage we ask people how often or how regularly do you watch the daily show and the call barrackpore only about thirteen percent of people said that they watched it even on occasion so the young people that are watching these shows are not the  not typical but exposure to politics even on those shows makes you more likely to say you're interested in running for office because even though they're satire and even though jon stewart in particular would criticize and highlight all of the problems there was also this pretty optimistic under you know underpinning which was that government has the capacity to do better and with better people in there there might be success so if we could get everybody to watch those shows i'm i wouldn't be concerned if the same thing people often ask well do you think that shows like house of cards are veep or what's turning people off know if you can follow house of cards you're already very turned on is it possible the barrage of polls and poll results quoted daily into the negative attitude toward politics is this a kind of self fulfilling prophecy i think so as long as the conversation is always about who's up and who's down who's ahead who gain to lost and there's i should just say as a political scientist zero attention whatsoever to the margin of error so you see that things are changing when actually nothing is actually changing it reinforces the idea that this is just a game and that this has nothing to do with substance it has nothing to do with solving problems again it's tricky because you as a candidate want to raise money and one of the best things that you can do to motivate donors is to highlight that you are ahead in the polls because everybody wants to support a winner think the best thing that as far as congress is concerned it's very difficult right now because there are institutional rules and norms that make it difficult for any one person to change the way things get done and actually it makes it quite easy for a small group of people to obstruct and make sure that people don't get anything done and we can see the recent speaker of the house elections in the materials and the days leading up to that as evidence of that but i think one of the most important things to do is to actually do what you want and vote your interests and vote your constituents interests and to do it in a way where you actually have a general belief in the importance of compromise and that second piece is the most important thing it's totally fine to run a campaign as an idealogue it's totally fine to believe all of those things but at the end of the day there are four hundred thirty five members of the house of representatives and either everyone can move a little and maybe something can get done or everybody can dig in their heels and nothing will get done and i think the goal is to make sure that you get an outcome that's as close to what you want as possible but that an outcome matters more than no outcome at all and that seems to be where we've moved away so i would i would push for outcomes how's that for the most vague political statement  twenty five years this generation has only seen dysfunction they've only seen government shutdowns they've only seen hyperbolic partisanship but over time there have been a lot of crises and a lot of periods of dysfunction that we've gotten through and we and we've regrouped from the civil war for example was not a walk in the park the civil rights era not so great initially right but we pull ourselves up and we get through these kinds of things the problem right now is that the reason i'm worried is that i'm not convinced that we have the best group of people ready to take on that challenge and that's why the book is trying to incentivize political aptitude and political interest because we can swing the other way as long as we have new voices and fresh