Newswise — The ninth season of the hit television program American Idol is scheduled to begin Tuesday, January 12, almost a year after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. Professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill, a civil rights lawyer and law professor at the University of Maryland Law School, authored a provocative essay exploring the link between the two phenomena. From Idol to Obama: What TV Elections Teach Us About Race, Youth & Voting appears in the recently released collection of essays Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America's New Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). The book includes the contribution of over a dozen scholars analyzing the significance of the election of President Obama.
In her essay, Professor Ifill makes the argument that "elections" on television programs like American Idol strongly influenced young people who ultimately entered the electorate during the period of Obama's presidential campaign. Rather than just isolated pop culture phenomena, these television talent programs have essentially shaped the voting expectations of millions of young people. Ifill notes that each year more than 32 million votes are cast each week in the final weeks of American Idol. The use of telephone voting, the ability to cast multiple ballots for one candidate, and even the dramatic racial controversies that have emerged on American Idol over the years, have all influenced young voters.
Obama's campaign tapped into a young electorate that had been trained by television voting, and used techniques that seemed familiar to those voters. Whether using text messaging (to inform his supporters about the choice of Senator Joe Biden as his running mate) or encouraging "early voting" (putting voter convenience ahead of the traditional crunch of "election day" voting), Obama's campaign appealed to young people whose formative voting experiences were shaped as part of a television "electorate."
Professor Ifill also argues that we can learn important lessons about how to improve the political election process, by examining voting on programs like American Idol. She is available to talk about these lessons.
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