On Saturday, April 9, John Fetterman, Katie McGinty and Joe Sestak — candidates in Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party primary for the U.S. Senate — will visit Penn State to take part in a televised town hall-style forum. The forum, sponsored and produced by WPSU Penn State and Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy, will broadcast statewide in advance of Pennsylvania’s April 26 primary, and will focus on issues important to young people.
Chris Beem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute, helped to organize the forum and says that the importance of the youth vote cannot be understated. “Twenty-five percent of all registered voters in Pennsylvania are under the age of 34,” Beem said. “For the first time, millennials outnumber baby boomers in the voting population.”
At the same time, young voters are demonstrating disillusionment with politics and with democracy itself. Citing a study by Harvard University’s Robert Foa and Yascha Mounk, Beem explains that “fewer than 30 percent of Americans born since 1980 say that living in a democracy is essential.”
Recognizing the importance of the youth vote and young voters’ dissatisfaction with the state of our democratic system, the McCourtney Institute partnered with WPSU and student groups across campus to develop a forum that addressed the issues that matter to millennials while also realizing the ideals of the democratic process. “The idea,” Beem explained, “was to engage young people in every aspect of the forum — from the format to the questions. By having students participate in the process, we hope to have created something that will bring their issues to the table and encourage civil and meaningful debate among the candidates.”
Plans for the forum started in the classroom of John Gastil, professor and head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences and director of the McCourtney Institute. Gastil asked his students who were studying democratic deliberation to develop a format that would embody the principles of effective public discussion. “The nationally televised debates in this election cycle have become pure show business,” Gastil said. “There are better ways to deliberate on the issues, and my students helped us come up with several alternative formats.”
Alexa Ain, a student in Gastil’s CAS 409 class said, "Studying deliberation in class has really opened my eyes to how effective discussion between two or more people can be. Having the ability to see this being done in person, at the debate on Saturday between the candidates for the U.S. Senate, will be fascinating.”
The format for the forum was refined in partnership with the production team at WPSU. Veteran host Patty Satalia will moderate the discussion and take questions from students in the live audience. She recognizes the unique nature of the event. “Young people are an important part of the Pennsylvania electorate and an important segment of the public television audience. As a broadcaster, it is exciting to host a candidate forum that was developed in partnership with college students. I look forward to hearing their questions on Saturday night.”
Gastil is excited about what the WPSU partnership adds to the classroom experience. “Students at Penn State will get to see what happens when their ideas get distilled by a team of Emmy award-winning broadcasters who can put ideas into action and on screens across the state. That kind of partnership is Penn State at its best.”
With the hard work of planning behind them, the students, faculty and staff involved in the forum turn to the task ahead.
“The candidates are going to take the stage on Saturday night and engage students and their concerns directly," Beem said. "That alone makes this debate different. I don’t know what they will say or what conclusions the audience will draw about each of their campaigns. What I do know is that engaging young people in the democratic process is core to our mission in the McCourtney Institute and critical to our future as a society — and by that measure, this forum is already a rousing success.”
The forum is currently sold out, but will broadcast live at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 9, on wpsu.org/live. The live television broadcast will also be available on WPSU-TV, WVIA-TV (Scranton), WITF-TV (Harrisburg), WQED-TV (Pittsburgh), WQLN-TV (Erie), and WLVT-TV (Bethlehem). WHYY-TV (Philadelphia) will broadcast the forum at 5 p.m. April 12.