The election goes pop

I got a call from P. Diddy last week. He told me that I should vote in the election. I was a little surprised to hear the venerable Puffy -- even if it was pre-recorded -- espousing the virtues of democracy. But I guess I shouldn't have been, judging by the near-constant barrage of pop culture attention paid to the election recently. Puffy's call was just part of his "Vote or Die" campaign to get youth voters to the polls.

These types of get-out-the-vote drives for young people are not new. Clinton appeared on MTV in 1992, and for a number of elections, that network has been running its "Choose or Lose" campaign. But this year was different. This year, even the World Wrestling Federation joined in urging people aged 18 to 30 to vote.

"You can get young people to vote, but they want to be invited to the party," Assistant Director of the Annette Strauss Institute at the University of Texas Mary Dixson told Cox News Service. "They're courted by the media, by Verizon and Levi's and everything else, and their attention doesn't get drawn unless there is a focused effort."

Well, we were certainly invited to the 2004 party. Over the past two years, an unprecedented amount of pop culture time and effort was devoted to the elections. Fahrenheit 9/11 and Team America: World Police covered the movies. Books like Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring overran the bestseller lists for more than a year. Even the Internet got into the game, circulating the well-known "JibJab" cartoon of Bush and Kerry singing to the tune of This Land Is Your Land.

What all this points to is a significant shift in how pop culture and politics interact. During the 1980s and 1990s, the two entities didn't even nod as they passed each other on Locust Walk. Pop culture media focused mostly on the individual, and anything that was politically based centered on the local level; songs about police brutality were much more common than songs about national foreign policy. But this election cycle changed that dynamic quite clearly.

And the change seemed to have had an effect. While there are still conflicting reports about the exact number of youth voters in this election, it is certainly a historical high. Most estimates hover around 21 million youth votes, about a 52 percent turnout rate. This represents a tremendous 10 percent increase in turnout from four years ago (before pop culture started getting into the mix) and the highest rate since the 1970s.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Michael Moore and MTV are solely responsible for getting young people to the polls. Obviously, this election was viewed by nearly all Americans as the most important of their lifetime, and overall turnout was extremely high. Even more telling is the fact that battleground states had significantly higher turnout than safe states, evidence that young people were driven to the polls when they thought their vote mattered most.

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