Politics. That’s right– the P word. In the fast-flowing sphere of our current politics, it seems like there’s always a new story to read, a new scandal to uncover, a new wildly wordy war of he said, she said. Whether you fall into the democratic domain, the Republican realm, or perhaps hang halfway between, your political stance is a curious culmination of your experiences, a mix of all the people you’ve come to know and things you’ve encountered.
Now, everyone knows your youthful years begin to build your beliefs, from our desires and dreams to our personal politics. Specifically for a teen living in the Bay Area, you grow up on a particular political planet, almost politically detached from the surrounding states. In a 2013 study, Bay Area cities such as San Francisco to Sonoma were surveyed to be over 50% democratic, which is drastically different from the 32% demographic of Democrats in the greater United States.
Does this mean that all developing teens here in the Bay Area are destined by design to become Democrats? How many depart from the popular politics of this particular place? What disrupting detail or pivotal point in one’s early life permanently affects their politics? These are the questions that I aim to answer! Through a sectioned survey examining topics from social issues to domestic policy and a subsequent series of interviews with interested and active adolescents, I intend to investigate what constitutes an individual’s political intuition. My first step was creating and sending out a survey about current political issues to set a standard political scale. The range was from 125 (being largely liberal) to 25 (being conversely conservative). After identifying the outlying individuals I set forth to interview people about their personal perspectives and circumstances, and moreover, to observe what oddities and occurrences originate the political outliers. So… let’s get political!
