The University’s role in national politics hit its apex when it hosted the first 2004 presidential debate followed by 2007’s Univisión debates broadcast in Spanish.

Casey Klofstad, an assistant professor since 2005 in the Department of Political Science, calls this new UM tradition “really important.” To keep the momentum growing and help students scratch the four-year itch, he’s teaching a first-time UM offering this fall, POL 408: The 2008 Election. Its 100-plus students will tackle key issues through a series of lectures by media and political experts and get their “hands dirty” developing and administering an exit poll to Miami-Dade County voters come November.

“We’ll have students asking questions about partisanship, race, ethnicity, and country of origin,” as well as “what’s motivating their choices,” Klofstad explains. He hopes to combine these poll results with similar data UM faculty collected during the 2004 election.

“It’s part of a big research project to look at especially how immigrants to the United States vote,” offers Louise Davidson-Schmich, an associate professor of political science who advised the College Republicans student group before going on sabbatical this year. She says while election years generally bump up interest in political science on U.S. college campuses, she’s not sure that will translate to more college-age voters this year. “I’m cynical,” she admits.

Klofstad disagrees based on an upward trend of youth voting since 2000, Obama’s ability to draw new voters, and an overall “very high stimulus state of the election.”

Davidson-Schmich’s research on gender and political ambition in Europe took her to Germany for the summer. Not only is that country ahead of the United States in electing a woman to its top post, it also beat us to a decision on who our next president should be. She says a German newspaper asked its readers to vote online months ago for “Obama, Clinton, McCain, or ‘Anybody But Bush.’” In that contest, Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, “and they both hands-down beat [John] McCain,” she recalls. “‘Anybody But Bush’ did well too.”

But no matter whom U.S. voters put in the Oval Office or how many of us turn out to vote, Klofstad believes his students will be richer simply for digging into the political process. “And that’s something they’ll carry with them as they leave UM,” he notes. “One of the things we know about politics is, like most other behaviors, it’s habitual.”