I just listened to NPR's Morning Edition and learned that Jerry Falwell Jr, has declared no classes for Election Day on Nov 4th.
The University located in Lynchburg, VA has 10,000 students. I have no idea how this might tip things in VA. Of course I have faith in the Obama campaign to counter this elsewhere in the state.
It's part of a grand strategy to get Liberty's 10,000 students to vote in Virginia. The university will bus students to the polls, stage an all-day concert complete with food, and lift curfew so they can watch the results on a giant-screen TV.
"We never told them how to vote," Falwell says. "We never even talked about the issues. We just talked about the fact that Virginia was right on the fence and could go either way — and that they could become known as the college that elected a president if the numbers came down just right."
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Yea, they never told them how to vote but:
Falwell says 80 percent to 90 percent of his students are Republican. But not all are registered to vote in Virginia. So the school told dorm leaders like Kathryn Lewellyn to see to it that everyone had the proper forms.
"We had to go around that night to every room and make sure if anybody wanted to register, they could," she recalls. "Even in class the next day, for commuters, if they didn't get registration forms, the professors were handing them out."
But here's some good news:
Are there any Democrats at Liberty?
"I've seen them," says Danielle Fierro, "and I knew one, but he transferred."
Eventually, two Obama supporters are located, not through the College Democrats club — there isn't one here — but through the Obama campaign. Asked what his classmates say when they find out he's voting Democrat, Brian Diaz, a freshman from Orlando, Fla., laughs. "At first they asked me, 'Are you a Christian?' "
But Diaz and sophomore Joel Krautter believe they're making inroads. Recently, they manned an Obama table on campus, and Krautter says they were thrilled with the results.
"Oh, we had a great turnout here," he says. "We had an astounding number of people sign up for the campaign."
How many? Krautter thinks for a minute. "Like, 150."
I applaud those 150 young people for standing up for what they believe in the face of what must be dreadful peer pressure. Good for them.