Link: www.desmoinesregister.com/...
'Our Caucus' participant Taylor Gipple never cared to vote until he saw Bernie Sanders.
I've never participated in the Iowa caucuses, and just within the last year, I decided to YouTube "caucus" to see how the process actually works. You have to understand that for most of my childhood, I grew up seeing a presidential impeachment, a failed war, the Great Recession, and multiple natural disasters.
I hated politics: the corruption, the money, the debacle, so much so that I've always refused to vote on Election Day. It really didn't seem worth the trouble to caucus, register to vote and then take the time to vote for a candidate who I didn't genuinely agree with anyway.
When asked who I was going to vote for, I would politely tell people, 'I'm just not into politics," and then quickly try to switch the topic to avoid an argument. People have always chastised me for not participating in elections, but apparently I was not alone in my thinking, as around 3 out of 4 young people (ages 18-29) did not vote in the last presidential election.
However, around nine months ago, I began to educate myself on the potential presidential candidates so I could confirm there wasn't a candidate whose ideas I fully agreed with. That is when I stumbled upon Bernie Sanders, and my thinking changed. The next few nights were spent staying up too late watching videos of him standing up for gay rights in the early '90s, listening to him blast the current campaign finance system and watching him predict what would happen after the war in Iraq.
This led to working up the courage to attend a few of Sanders' rallies here in Iowa and then explaining to my friends and family that I'm not a socialist commie.
I've since registered to vote and now am very excited to participate in my first, "first in the nation" Iowa caucus in a few months. I'm hoping that people my age will begin to educate themselves, so they can find a candidate who they agree with and will also come to realize the importance of participating in the caucus and election cycle as a whole.
Taylor Gipple is a 22-year-old Des Moines native and recent University of Northern Iowa graduate who works in IT in Des Moines.
